Book Image

Geospatial Development By Example with Python

By : Pablo Carreira
5 (1)
Book Image

Geospatial Development By Example with Python

5 (1)
By: Pablo Carreira

Overview of this book

From Python programming good practices to the advanced use of analysis packages, this book teaches you how to write applications that will perform complex geoprocessing tasks that can be replicated and reused. Much more than simple scripts, you will write functions to import data, create Python classes that represent your features, and learn how to combine and filter them. With pluggable mechanisms, you will learn how to visualize data and the results of analysis in beautiful maps that can be batch-generated and embedded into documents or web pages. Finally, you will learn how to consume and process an enormous amount of data very efficiently by using advanced tools and modern computers’ parallel processing capabilities.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Geospatial Development By Example with Python
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Working with polygons


Supposing we want to filter our data by a given region, it's possible to assume that this region is represented by a polygon.

For example, the following image represents the world counties' borders, it was rendered from a Shapefile where each feature is a country and it's geometry is a polygon.

Differently from the geocaching point, whose geometries are only a pair of coordinates, a polygon is a sequence of at least three-point coordinates beginning and ending at the same point.

By now, you can assume that we won't be able to store the polygon's coordinates with the same structure that we had with the geocaching point. We will need to store the whole OGR geometry or store something that can be transformed from or to it.

How these polygons are represented is an important subject, because mastering it allows you to manipulate them any way you need to do any kind of work. It also allows you to build polygons from point coordinates (from a GPS for example) or form shapes such...