Python and GIS

[Thomas Guettler]

Hi

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.

I searched for GIS and Python with google but only
got AVPython as result. AFAIK this does not help me,
since it needs ArcView.

I am new to GIS but not to programming. Have
you any hints?
Please send me some links pointing to sites which
could help me develop this.

Up to now Web and GUI solutions are possible.

I found:

  PDFMap http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfmap/
    This looks interesting, but I don't like that
    I can't control the viewer (AcrobatReader)
    I think it is not possible to open the map
    at a given position from my application.

  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.

  Sketch http://sketch.sourceforge.net/
    Sketch can display vector grafic.
    Making it interactive would need some
    coding. Drawback: It is developed for
    unix not win32.

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


  thomas