Putting It All Together

Throughout the book, we’ve touched upon all the important aspects of geospatial analysis, and we’ve used a variety of different techniques in Python to analyze different types of geospatial data. In this final chapter, we will draw on nearly all of the topics we have covered to produce a real-world product that has become very popular – a GPS route analysis report.

These reports are common to dozens of mobile app services, GPS watches, in-car navigation systems, and other GPS-based tools. A GPS typically records location, time, and elevation. From these values, we can derive a vast amount of ancillary information about what happened along the route on which that data was recorded. Fitness apps, including Runkeeper, MapMyRun, Strava, and Nike Plus, all use similar reports to present GPS-tracked exercise data from running, hiking, biking, and walking.

We will create one of these reports using Python. This program is nearly 500 lines...