Book Image

Mastering Geospatial Analysis with Python

By : Silas Toms, Paul Crickard, Eric van Rees
Book Image

Mastering Geospatial Analysis with Python

By: Silas Toms, Paul Crickard, Eric van Rees

Overview of this book

Python comes with a host of open source libraries and tools that help you work on professional geoprocessing tasks without investing in expensive tools. This book will introduce Python developers, both new and experienced, to a variety of new code libraries that have been developed to perform geospatial analysis, statistical analysis, and data management. This book will use examples and code snippets that will help explain how Python 3 differs from Python 2, and how these new code libraries can be used to solve age-old problems in geospatial analysis. You will begin by understanding what geoprocessing is and explore the tools and libraries that Python 3 offers. You will then learn to use Python code libraries to read and write geospatial data. You will then learn to perform geospatial queries within databases and learn PyQGIS to automate analysis within the QGIS mapping suite. Moving forward, you will explore the newly released ArcGIS API for Python and ArcGIS Online to perform geospatial analysis and create ArcGIS Online web maps. Further, you will deep dive into Python Geospatial web frameworks and learn to create a geospatial REST API.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
7
Geoprocessing with Geodatabases
Index

Shapely


Shapely is a Python package for manipulation and analysis of planar features, using functions from the GEOS library (the engine of PostGIS) and a port of the JTS. Shapely is not concerned with data formats or coordinate systems but can be readily integrated with packages that are. Shapely only deals with analyzing geometries and offers no capabilities for reading and writing geospatial files. It was developed by Sean Gillies, who was also the person behind Fiona and Rasterio.

Shapely supports eight fundamental geometry types that are implemented as a class in the shapely.geometry module—points, multipoints, linestrings, multilinestrings, linearrings, multipolygons, polygons, and geometrycollections. Apart from representing these geometries, Shapely can be used to manipulate and analyze geometries through a number of methods and attributes.

Shapely has mainly the same classes and functions as OGR while dealing with geometries. The difference between Shapely and OGR is that Shapely has...