The Shapely library is used for creating and manipulating 2D vector data without the need for a spatial database. Not only does it do away with a database, it also does away with projections and data formats, focusing on geometry only. The strength of Shapely is that it uses easily-readable syntax to create a variety of geometries that can be used for geometric operations.
With the aid of other Python packages, these geometries and the results of geometric operations can be written to a vector file format and projected if necessary—we'll cover examples combing pyproj and Fiona with Shapely's capabilities. An example of a workflow incorporating Shapely might be where you'd read vector geometries out of a shapefile ...
