So You'd Like to Make a Map using Python

Cool article, explains how you can do anything using Python, although doesn&#x27;t mention Mapnik. However, for most people, these days I would recommend to try TileMill (<a href="https://www.mapbox.com/tilemill/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mapbox.com&#x2F;tilemill&#x2F;</a>) to make a map. The CartoCSS can let you style anything based on attributes and it also lets you add and style raster data.

My biggest problem with maps these days is the data license for commercial use. I dont need very detailed map, usually administrative level 2, but it&#x27;s hard to find accurate sources that dont make you pay thousands of dollars per small userbase. We create our own app and distribute it, therefore cannot exactly estimate our userbase. Does anybody know of a decent source with good, fairly detailed world maps and liberal license ? Doesn&#x27;t have to be free.

In our company we use python to make maps, but we go with the traditional GIS approach, dependencies?: postgis and mapnik. The first two examples would be solved by a single postgis query, the last one maybe would require some extra work. But nice work anyway, bookmarked.

Surprised to see that they&#x27;re using basemap instead of cartopy. There&#x27;s nothing wrong with using basemap, but it can be a bit clunky, i.m.o.<p>Then again, cartopy is only a year or two old, so it doesn&#x27;t have the traction that basemap does. It&#x27;s gained a fairly large following very quickly, though.

There&#x27;s also Vincent[1], which has some mapping capabilities and is built on top of Vega (a &quot;visualization grammar&quot; for d3js).<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/wrobstory/vincent" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;wrobstory&#x2F;vincent</a>

Cartography? Hasn&#x27;t everything already sort of been discovered, though by, like, Magellan and Cortés?

Very cool, article. I&#x27;ve always loved maps and mapping and python is my preferred language. The only thing I would mention is that it would be nice to have a pic of the results earlier in the article, that&#x27;s just from the &quot;let&#x27;s look at this article, seems cool but what exactly is he teaching me&quot; angle. I&#x27;m more likely to try the code if I can see the results up front. Otherwise it was a really cool example.

<a href="http://www.robots-everywhere.com/re_wiki/index.php?title=Gehandler" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.robots-everywhere.com&#x2F;re_wiki&#x2F;index.php?title=Geh...</a> I wrote a sort of google earth API wrapper thing in python if anyone wants it. Windows only though.

What are blue plaques?

Very interesting, it had never occurred to me that there were probably python libraries for mapping. My ArcMap license expires in less than two weeks, perhaps I will give this a shot before I re-up.

This is exactly why I prefer R for static maps. Would have taken like a quarter of the time, if that.

Cool! I have been looking for an article like this. Thank you for sharing.