Understanding reprojection
In GIS, reprojection is all about changing the coordinates in a dataset from one coordinate system to another. While reprojection is less common these days due to more advanced methods of data distribution, sometimes you need to reproject a vector data source. The pure Python utm module works for reference system conversion, but for a full reprojection, we need some help from the OGR Python API. The OGR API contained in the osgeo module also provides the Open Spatial Reference module, also known as osr, which we’ll use for reprojection.
As an example, we’ll use a point shapefile containing New York City museum and gallery locations in the Lambert conformal projection. We’ll reproject it to WGS84 geographic (or un-project, it rather). You can download this zipped shapefile from https://git.io/vLbT4.
The following minimalist script reprojects the shapefile. The geometry is transformed and then written to the new file, but the .dbf...
