Looking For Geodetic Python Software

[paron]

Howard Butler http://hobu.biz/ has some nice Python wrappers for gdal
and Frank Warmerdam's other tools. I have to say, though, that geodesy
is inherently complicated. Python makes it easy to program, but not
easy to understand. http://maps.hobu.net:7080/RPC2 is an XMLRPC service
that he exposes that will transform various coordinate systems: take a
look at http://hobu.biz/index_html/projection_service/blogentry_view to
see what I mean.

Ron Phillips

Tim Daneliuk wrote:
> Is anyone aware of freely available Python modules that can do any of
> the following tasks:
>
> 1) Given the latitude/longitude of two locations, compute the distance
>     between them.  "Distance" in this case would be either the straight-line
>     flying distance, or the actual over-ground distance that accounts for
>     the earth's curvature.
>
> 2) Given n latitude/longitude coordinates, compute the
>     "geocenter".  That is, return the lat/long of the location that
>     is most "central" to all n initial coordinates.
>
> 3)  Given n lat/long coordinates, compute a Kruskal-type spanning
>      tree.
>
> 4) Given n lat/long coordinates, compute an optimal (shortest or longest)
>     visitation path that reaches each node exactly once.  Better still would
>     be something that had "pluggable" heuristic engines so we could try
>     different approaches like greedy, shortest-path, hill climbing, and
>     so forth.  It would be even nicer if one could also simulate different
>     routing schemes (Monte Carlo?).
>
> In effect, I'm looking for something that mates traditional graph traversal
> heuristics with operations research tools working on a geodetic
> coordinate system.   This is *waaaaay* outside my field of expertise so
> I'm hoping someone has taken the pain of it for dummies like me ;)
>
> TIA,
> --
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Tim Daneliuk     tundra at tundraware.com
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