Hi list, I have been looking for an easy to use open source analytical library for processing GIS data. I thought I would ask here first. I often work with data and want a clean high level data api for doing spatial analysis. I am looking for something similar ArcPy but not in the ESRI world. Correct if I am wrong, but projects like Shapely are focused on processing and analyzing geometries. On the other hand projects like Ogr/Gdal allow me to create and manipulate Shapefiles and PostGIS tables but lack analytical capabilities. Same thing with geoscript <http://geoscript.org/>.
For example, I would like to buffer the features of a shapefile and save the results of another shapfile. Something like from something import ops ops.buffer(“input_shapfile.shp”, “output_shapefile”,10) Thats taken right from the ESRI's documentation. With ogr or geoscript, I could do this but I would have to load the Shapefile into memory, iterate through the features, call the buffer method on each geometry objects and then save the results to a new file. This is rather complicated for mere mortals. Is there a open source library that does this? Would this be a useful thing to develop for the open source community? Or am I totally bat s**t crazy and this is not really useful? Thanks guys. Ivan Willig 818-212-4554
