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

Understanding geospatial databases

A geospatial database, or geodatabase, refers to an entire category of file formats, data schemas, and even software. In Chapter 3, The Geospatial Technology Landscape, we'll cover geodatabases as software packages, formally known as database management systems. But in this section, we'll describe their attributes as file formats. Geodatabases historically stored only vector data, though modern geodatabases are well-suited for raster data management as well.

Geodatabases can exhibit all of the common traits we noted previously. This information is stored in the database in what we call the database model. A very popular model is the traditional relational model, which uses tables of rows and columns. Each row and column combination is called a cell. Rows can be related to another table to link information using a designated column where...