pymapgb

This provides a GBBasemap for use in plotting geographic data for Great Britain at the county level. We use data from the UK Data Service to provide Basemap like object in matplotlib.

Motivation

I could not find a python module to plot maps of the UK with county level data. If you know of any, please do let me know :D

Installation

To install please run

$ python setup.py install

This downloads all the shape-files and places them in ~/.shape_files where you can also add your own shape-files if you please. The module pymapgb should now be available to use.

A simple example

A Minimum working example is provided in the file countries.py, the basics are as follows:

• First create a map instance:

  import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
  from pymapgb import GBBasemap
  GBmap = GBBasemap()

• this provides several methods. The first is draw_by_request, this automates alot of the work, for example to draw the outline of a country:

  GBmap.draw_by_request("country", "england", facecolor="w", edgecolor="k")

• and to add county level data:

  GBmap.draw_by_request("counties", "wales", colors='random')

• However what we want to draw is usually dictated by the data. To this end a low level method is available draw_by_file_name which takes the file-name of a shape-file (in the ~/.shape_files/ directory) and works directly from that.

Examples

Countries of Great Britain

Counties of Great Britain

Status

This is in an early development status and requires quite a lot of work before it can be useful generally. I would love it if you want to be involved, feel free to PR anytime with anything you like.

TODO

• Fix missing English counties
• Documentation
• Implementation of coloring