GeoViews

GeoViews is a new Python library that makes it easy to explore and visualize geographical, meteorological, oceanographic, weather, climate, and other real-world data. GeoViews was developed by Continuum Analytics, in collaboration with the Met Office. GeoViews is completely open source, available under a BSD license freely for both commercial and non-commercial use, and can be obtained as described at the Github site.GeoViews is built on the HoloViews library for building flexible visualizations of multidimensional data.

GeoViews adds a family of geographic plot types, transformations, and primitives based primarily on the Cartopy library, plotted using either the Matplotlib or Bokeh packages.

https://www.continuum.io/blog/developer-blog/introducing-geoviews

New Library for Easily Visualizing Shapefiles!

I have always wanted a quick and simple way to view what the outcome of my geoprocessing looked like without having to open a Desktop GIS everytime, and the only alternatives have traditionally been to install Matplotlib and a bunch of other heavy dependencies, spend hours trying to learn them, only to complicate my script with lengthy and confusing syntax that I still don’t quite get (what does it even mean to “add data to an axis”?). All I wanted to do was to view my shapefile.

So as a new addition to our list of resources, I decided to write and just finished and released a new geo-library that does exactly this, the Python Geographic Visualizer (GeoVis). It is lightweight, has no dependencies, and lets you view or save an image of your shapefile with just a single line of code. It is also possible to build a map from scratch and play around with colors and symbols. Read more or try it for yourself by clicking here and you can easily create maps like the one above (though that map was cropped to better fit the post).