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

Python markup and tag-based parsers

Tag-based data, particularly different XML dialects, have become a very popular way to distribute geospatial data. Formats that are both machine and human-readable are generally easy to work with, though they sacrifice storage efficiency for usability. These formats can become unmanageable for very large datasets but work very well in most cases.

While most formats are some form of XML (such as KML or GML), there is a notable exception. The Well-Known Text (WKT) format is fairly common but uses external markers and square brackets ([]) to surround data instead of tags in angled brackets around data like XML does.

Python has standard library support for XML, as well as some excellent third-party libraries available. Proper XML formats all follow the same structure, so you can use a generic XML library to read it. Because XML is text-based, it...