Python and GIS

[Bernhard Herzog]

Thomas Guettler <zopestoller at thomas-guettler.de> writes:

> I need an interactive map:
> 
> The user should zoom in and out. In the smallest
> view needed you should see towns. Some
> towns should be "clickable". If you click on
> a town data from our database should be displayed.
> 
> Now I need two things: The data and the viewer.
> 
> The data should be from russia.
> 
> It would be good if the data and the viewer are
> open source. But this is not an obligation.

Getting free geographic data is a big problem outside of the USA. I'm
not sure about the situation in Russia but in Europe most geo-data
collected by the government is sold only for very high fees.

[...]
> Up to now Web and GUI solutions are possible.
[...]
>   MapIt http://www.mapit.de/index.en.html
>     MapIt looks good. I think it could be used.
>     Since it uses raster data I would need
>     a huge image of russia.

The images used by MapIt could be easily rendered from EPS files. This
worked reasonable well in e.g. http://www.eine-erde-altar.net/ (the site
seems to be down at the moment, though) :(

Keep in mind though that MapIt is intended to be a *simple* raster map
server although displaying icons on the map and associating links with
those icons is one of it's main purposes.

For more advanced web-mapping you should have a look at the UMN
Mapserver: http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/index.html 
Mapserver supports Python scripting AFAIK.

>   Sketch http://sketch.sourceforge.net/
>     Sketch can display vector grafic.
>     Making it interactive would need some
>     coding.

It is interactive.

> Drawback: It is developed for
>     unix not win32.

I wouldn't mind if someone would work on a port to Windows ;-) Or if
some one would hire me to do that :)

I'm not sure how easy it would be to turn Sketch into a geodata viewer.
There is a plugin for reading shapefiles, though, so it can be used to
create maps.

Anyway, Thuban might be what you're really looking for:
http://thuban.intevation.org/index.html

Thuban is written with wxPython and runs on Unix and Windows. It perhaps
doesn't do everything you need yet but depending on what you need
exactly it might be relatively simple to add.

Thuban was intended from the start to server as the basis for other
applications. We use it for GREAT-ER for instance:
http://great-er.intevation.org

>   FreeGIS http://freegis.org/index.en.html
>     Good site with a lot of link. Unfortunately
>     too many links for gis-newbies like me.

The tutorial (in German) might help: http://freegis.org/freegis_tutorial/

HTH,

   Bernhard


-- 
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