The geospatial technology ecosystem consists of hundreds of software libraries and packages. This vast array of choices can be overwhelming for newcomers to geospatial analysis. The secret to learning geospatial analysis quickly is understanding the handful of libraries and packages that really matter. Most software, both commercial and open source, is derived from these critical packages. Understanding the ecosystem of geospatial software and how it's used allows you to quickly comprehend and evaluate any geospatial tool.
Geospatial libraries can be assigned to one or more of the following high-level core capabilities, which they implement to some degree. We will be learning about these capabilities in this chapter:
- Data access
- Computational geometry (including data reprojection)
- Image processing
- Visualization tools
- Metadata tools
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