Book Image

Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python - Third Edition

By : Joel Lawhead
Book Image

Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python - Third Edition

By: Joel Lawhead

Overview of this book

Geospatial analysis is used in almost every domain you can think of, including defense, farming, and even medicine. With this systematic guide, you'll get started with geographic information system (GIS) and remote sensing analysis using the latest features in Python. This book will take you through GIS techniques, geodatabases, geospatial raster data, and much more using the latest built-in tools and libraries in Python 3.7. You'll learn everything you need to know about using software packages or APIs and generic algorithms that can be used for different situations. Furthermore, you'll learn how to apply simple Python GIS geospatial processes to a variety of problems, and work with remote sensing data. By the end of the book, you'll be able to build a generic corporate system, which can be implemented in any organization to manage customer support requests and field support personnel.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: The History and the Present of the Industry
5
Section 2: Geospatial Analysis Concepts
10
Section 3: Practical Geospatial Processing Techniques

Tracking vehicles

For our first real-time data source, we'll use the excellent NextBus API. NextBus (http://www.nextbus.com/) is a commercial service that tracks public transportation for municipalities including buses, trolleys, and trains. People riding these transit lines can then track the arrival time of the next bus.

What's even better is that, with the customer's permission, NextBus publishes tracking data through a REpresentational State Transfer (REST) API. Using URL API calls, developers can request information about a vehicle and receive an XML document about its location. This API is a straightforward way to begin using real-time data.

If you go to NextBus, you'll see a web interface as shown in the following screenshot, showing data for the city of Los Angeles, California metro system:

The system lets you select several parameters to learn the...