In this talk (which was recorded as a dry run for a seminar) Rich presents a very brief introduction to the Python programming language from the point of view of someone wanting to perform data manipulation on geographic data. He outlines what a GIS is (essentially the meeting point between computers and map-making) and cover some issues to do with raster data on the Earth’s surface.

He covers the importance of choosing your sampling wisely, how to generate contoured heigh plots, faux 3d-shared relief maps, slope and aspect plots. Then there is a discussion about some simple de-noising strategies for freely accessible data and investigate a strange phenomenon in Oxfordshire.

Links

http://ipython.org/
http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/
http://github.com/rjw57/pygis
http://asterweb.jpl.nasa.gov/gdem.asp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_information_system
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanczos_resampling
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_blur