Book Image

Python Geospatial Development - Third Edition

By : Erik Westra
Book Image

Python Geospatial Development - Third Edition

By: Erik Westra

Overview of this book

Geospatial development links your data to locations on the surface of the Earth. Writing geospatial programs involves tasks such as grouping data by location, storing and analyzing large amounts of spatial information, performing complex geospatial calculations, and drawing colorful interactive maps. In order to do this well, you’ll need appropriate tools and techniques, as well as a thorough understanding of geospatial concepts such as map projections, datums, and coordinate systems. This book provides an overview of the major geospatial concepts, data sources, and toolkits. It starts by showing you how to store and access spatial data using Python, how to perform a range of spatial calculations, and how to store spatial data in a database. Further on, the book teaches you how to build your own slippy map interface within a web application, and finishes with the detailed construction of a geospatial data editor using the GeoDjango framework. By the end of this book, you will be able to confidently use Python to write your own geospatial applications ranging from quick, one-off utilities to sophisticated web-based applications using maps and other geospatial data.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Python Geospatial Development Third Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Further improvements and enhancements


As with any new application, there are a number of ways in which the ShapeEditor could be improved. Here are a few examples:

  • Adding user signup and login so that each user has his or her own private set of shapefiles, rather than every user seeing the entire list of all the uploaded shapefiles.

  • Adding the ability to edit a feature's attribute values.

  • Using CSS stylesheets, and possibly a user-interface library such as Bootstrap, to improve the look of the system's web pages.

  • Using a higher-resolution base map. An obvious candidate for this would be the GSHHS high-resolution shoreline database.

  • Adding a Tile cache for our TMS server.

  • Using JavaScript to add a please wait pop-up message while a shapefile is being imported or exported.

  • Improving the reusability of the ShapeEditor's codebase. We've concentrated on learning how to use GeoDjango to build a working system, but with a suitable redesign, the code could be made much more generic so that it can be used...