Analyzing and manipulating Geospatial data

Because geospatial data works with geometrical features such as points, lines, and polygons, you often need to perform various calculations using these geometrical features. Fortunately, there are some very powerful tools for doing exactly this. For reasons we will describe shortly, the library of choice for performing this type of computational geometry in Python is Shapely.

Shapely

Shapely is a Python package for the manipulation and analysis of two-dimensional geospatial geometries. It is based on the GEOS library, which implements a wide range of geospatial data manipulations in C++. GEOS is itself based on a library called the Java Topology Suite, which provides the same functionality for Java programmers. Shapely provides a Pythonic interface to GEOS, which makes it easy to use these manipulations directly from your Python programs.

Installing Shapely

Shapely will run on all major operating systems, including MS Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux....