GIS in Python for Beginners Part 2

The importance of the shape file and the importance of layers.

My last medium post on beginning GIS was well-read thanks for the comments and claps keep them coming, please. Presently I’m learning how to use this very useful tool as I need to visualise some data for a project in work. The adage “unless you can teach someone else something, you don’t know it yourself “is my rationale behind writing this article. As I learn more skills with GIS I thought I’d add some more information on using GIS with Python and particularly GeoPandas for other Medium users. In my previous article, I used Geopandas and Folium which created an HTML file.

https://medium.com/@drdredpath/starting-in-gis-a-beginners-tale-5d72349ba954

An HTML map is great if you need to be able to zoom in and out and interact with your diagram. It's one of the great features of Folium, but say you want to have a static image for a report or presentation then you’ll need a jpeg or png file to be the output. For this, GeoPandas can be used to build up your map using layers which are usually in the format of Shape or .shp files. You can also read CSV files that contain geographical information using Pandas. My examples will be set out using data from Northern Ireland for two reasons. Firstly I live here and secondly, the Open Data NI Portal has free high-quality GIS data available on it under an Open Government License, the link to the portal is below.