Python Geospatial Development - Third Edition

Designing and building the database

Let's start our design of the DISTAL application by thinking about the various pieces of data it will require:

• A list of all the countries. Each country needs to include a simple boundary map, which can be displayed to the user.
• Detailed shoreline and lake boundaries worldwide. A list of all major cities and towns worldwide.
• For each city/town, we need to have the name of the city/town and a point representing the location of that town or city.

Fortunately, this data is readily available:

• The list of countries and their outlines are included in the World Borders Dataset
• Shoreline and lake boundaries (as well as other land-water boundaries, such as islands within lakes) are readily available using the GSHHG shoreline ...