Working with GIS data manually
Let's take a brief look at the process of working with GIS data manually. Before we can begin, there are two things you need to do:
- Obtain some GIS data
- Install the GDAL library and its Python bindings so that you can read the necessary data files
Obtaining the data
Let's use the US Census Bureau's web site to download a set of vector maps for the various US states. The main site for obtaining GIS data from the US Census Bureau can be found at http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger.
To make things simpler, though, let's bypass the web site and directly download the file we need from http://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2014/STATE/tl_2014_us_state.zip.
The file, tl_2014_us_state.zip, should be a ZIP-format archive. After ...
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