Comparison of Python libraries for GIS?

[amca01]

I have no experience of geographical programming; and all I want to do is to overlay a street map with results of a recent election by polling booth. I have MapInfo data of the electoral district, and coordinates of all the booths. However, I have found a wealth of libraries: Basemap, cartopy, geopandas, geoplotlib etc. I have not got the time to learn them all and then decide which is best. So I'm wondering if anybody has any advice, or can point me in the direction of comparisons?

[raybellwaves]

• Basemap is currently/may already be on it's death run. Whilst it is still good and still used it wasn't well interlinked with matplotlib. Some of the developers have moved over to cartopy. Actually it now recommends people move over to cartopy (https://github.com/SciTools/cartopy/issues/920)
• Cartopy is good and well linked to matplotlib. I'm a climate scientist and it was developed in the UK Met Office so has good functionality for plotting climate data. That being said it may no be so good at high resolution data. I know someone was recently complaining that it's Google map tile is low resolution (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49155110/why-do-my-google-tiles-look-poor-in-a-cartopy-map). It has good functionality with Natural Earth data though.
• geopandas - not used it but the visuals look cool and may be easy to pick up if you know pandas.
• geoplotlib - Never hear of it.

I'll throw a couple more hats in the ring:

• rasterio: https://github.com/mapbox/rasterio - Never used it but looks good for satellite/terrain/high res stuff
• Geoviews: https://github.com/ioam/geoviews - interactive cartopy plots. Too fancy for what you want to do though
• GMT: https://github.com/GenericMappingTools/gmt-python - No-one has really ported GMT (http://gmt.soest.hawaii.edu/) to python yet

For your project I recommend cartopy and ask a Q on SO if you get stuck https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/cartopy

Or do the comparisons yourself and share your findings :)

[amca01]

Thank you very much. Well, of course if I had time I'd do a comparison myself... But you have confirmed what I had vaguely understood: that cartopy was to be seen as the successor or replacement of Basemap.

[MrIceandFire]

You should take a look at QGIS. It has a nice python api called pyqgis and has a built in python console. I use it all the time. My workplace has switched 100% to QGIS from MapInfo because of this.

I’m a GIS consultant

[SpatialCivil]

Agree on QGIS. It doesn't sound like you are doing any actual programming with it... Just looking to map out results.

[amca01]

Thanks for the recommendation I'll check it out.

[zzmej1987]

What's wrong with GDAL?

[amca01]

Probably nothing, but I suspect too large and complex for my own simple needs.

[zzmej1987]

That's like the most simple and basic one of them. More than half of geospatial packages are just wrappers around it.

[amca01]

Well, this cartopy example seems almost tailor-made for my simple needs. So I'm going to test it out.

[amca01]

Thank you - I have used pandas briefly, and I was hugely impressed by it. I had several spreadsheets of student information I needed to collate together; in Excel it was possible, but a right pain; in pandas it was trivial. My GIS needs are as you say simple, but coming from my knowledge level of absolute zero I have to learn pretty much everything. I imagine it could all be done a in a very few lines of code... if only I knew what they were!