Python Geospatial Development - Third Edition

Exercises

If you are interested in exploring the techniques used in this chapter further, you might like to challenge yourself with the following tasks:

• Change the bounding box calculation to exclude outlying islands.

  Tip

  Hint

  You can split each country's MultiPolygon into individual Polygon objects and then check the area of each polygon to exclude those that are smaller than a given total value.

• Use the World Borders Dataset to create a new shapefile, where each country is represented by a single Point geometry containing the geographical center of each country.

  Tip

  Hint

  You can start with the country bounding boxes we calculated earlier and then calculate the midpoint using this:

  midLat = (minLat + maxLat) / 2
  midLong = (minLong + maxLong) / 2