Reintroducing the GIS and Python Software Laboratory

Comments on a recent post make me think it's time to reintroduce the GIS and Python Software Laboratory. It's a fairly pretentious name for what's little more than a wiki, an issue tracker, a couple of subversion repositories, and a few mailing lists, but a name that describes well what we're doing: experimenting with bringing GIS to the C Python platform, and bringing Python programming idioms and distribution mechanisms to GIS software. We're designing better APIs that feel natural to a Python programmer. We're designing interoperability around Python protocols. We're designing software that can deployed in the standard Python fashion, and also with new tools like virtualenv and pip. Software that's modular, letting users pay only for what they eat.

Using the same dining metaphor, the lab proposes to you the following a la carte menu:

  • Geojson: implementation of the GeoJSON 1.0 spec

  • OWSLib: making W*S suck less

  • Quadtree: quad-tree index for spatial data

  • Rtree: R*-tree indexes for spatial data

  • Shapely: easy access to the GEOS spatial primitives

  • WorldMill: easy access to vector data using OGR

Mix and match. Hack. Build your own stacks, or stack-busting apps. For projections see pyproj. Subscribing to a similar philosophy, it fits well with the GIS-Python packages.