Looking For Geodetic Python Software

[Tim Daneliuk]

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,
-- 
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Tim Daneliuk     tundra at tundraware.com
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