Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 8. PostGIS Programming
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
• Writing PostGIS vector data with Psycopg
• Writing PostGIS vector data with OGR Python bindings
• Writing PostGIS functions with PL/Python
• Geocoding and reverse-geocoding using the GeoNames datasets
• Geocoding using the OSM datasets with trigrams
• Geocoding with geopy and PL/Python
• Importing netCDF datasets with Python and GDAL
Introduction
ThereareseveralwaystowritePostGISprograms;inthischapter,wewillseeafew
ofthem.YouwillmainlyusethePythonlanguagethroughoutthischapter.Pythonisa
fantasticlanguagewithaplethoraofGISandascientificlibrarythatcanbecombined
with PostGIS to write awesome geospatial applications.
In case you are new to Python, you can quickly get productive with these excellent
web resources:
• The official Python tutorial at
http://docs.python.org/2/tutorial/
• The popular
Dive into Python
book at
http://www.diveintopython.net/
• The
Learn Python in the hard way
class for a task-oriented training at
ht-
You can combine Python with someexcellent and popular libraries such as:
•
Psycopg
:ThisisthemostcompleteandpopularPythonDBAPIimplementa-
tion for PostgreSQL; see
http://initd.org/psycopg/
•
GDAL Python bindings
:TheseareusedtounchainthepowerfulGDALlib-
rary in your Python scripts; see
http://www.gdal.org/gdal_tutorial.html
•
urllib2
: This is a handy Python standard library to manage HTTP stuff such
as opening URLs
•
simplejson
: Thisis a simpleand fast JSON encoder/decoder
