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Converting ESRI .lpk files to Shapefiles for use in QGIS

Sep

17

2019

ESRI ArcGIS can export compressed geographic files using the ‘LPK’ file extension. ESRI also have a number of datasets available for free download on their website that use this extension, e.g. the popular North America Postal Areas and Zip Codes datasets. Unfortunately the LPK extension is a proprietary extension not directly supported by other tools, ...

Geospatial Data Verification

Sep

3

2019

Previously we looked at visual data verification using Python and Pandas. Here we shall extend this to look at geospatial data verification of the earlier Oklahoma Injection Well Dataset. Gesopatial data can be managed and plotted using Geopandas – a geospatial extension to Pandas. This comes with some basic basemap data, but you will probably ...

Visual Data Verification

Aug

28

2019

Previously we looked at importing and the initial verification of data in Python. Next we shall look at the visual verification of data. We shall use Pandas with Matplotlib to plot a series of graphs to check for erroneous data. We will use numpy, matplotlib, and pandas; and all of these can be installed with ...

Handling Unicode Input in Python

Aug

12

2019

We have looked at reading data into Python, but have ignored the issue of character encoding. In English speaking countries we often assume a text file or string is simple ASCII. More often than not, the file is actually a Unicode file. With Python 2, ignoring this issue would not usually result in any problems ...

Python Data Validation: Date & Time

Aug

7

2019

Regardless of language, handling dates and times is trickier than simple numbers and strings. This is because, even within the Gregorian system, there are a wide range of different formats in addition to multiple time zones and daylight savings / summer time corrections. Just to complicate things, the corrections vary according to date, and these ...

Python Data Validation

Aug

1

2019

Python is a good scripting language for data analysis and processing, but are you sure your imported data is valid? As well as import errors, it is possible the data itself contains errors such as values in the wrong field, inconsistent values/fields, and unexpected situations. Immediately after reading the data, you must validate it, and ...

Solving the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon Problem

Jul

29

2019

This article shows you how to solve the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game using a mixture of SPARQL and Python. Meanwhile, if you want to relax from problems like this, games such as w88 for mobile can be played. SPARQL SPARQL is a query language for triple stores that was born out of the ...

Importing Data into Python

Jul

25

2019

Python is a popular tool for data manipulation and processing. In this first post about Python data manipulation and input, we look at a number of different ways to get your data files loaded into Python. Structured non-tabular data Structured non-tabular data typically consists of data records with fields which are not always present, in ...

SaveMap Macro

Apr

1

2019

Maptitude 2019 introduced the concept of compressed workspaces. These are stored in “wrkz” files which replace the familiar “map” files. A workspace can contain multiple map (windows). This is a positive way forward because it makes it easier for users to transfer maps with one file – in a similar way as MapPoint users shared ...

How to Show the Latest WordPress Posts in an External Page

Feb

26

2019

We have recently re-organized the Winwaed.com homepage, and needed a widget to show the titles of the latest blog posts. In common with many WordPress installations, the website consists of static pages and a separate WordPress installation. The widget needed to work in a PHP page external to the WordPress installation, but access the WordPress ...