Geopandas and Matplotlib to automate data processing and mapping

Road Construction Visualizer

This tutorial will be an introduction to using Geopandas and Matplotlib to automate data download, data cleaning, basic analysis and map making. A basic understanding of Python, Python interpreters and Python module download will be assumed in this tutorial.

The data for this tutorial is hosted on Open Ottawa and can be found here. It has an application programming interface (API) which will also us to make requests to download data. Ensure to view the data tab on the City of Ottawa website. Explore a few pages and get familiar with the data. Pay special attention to the TARGETED_START date as this is the row we will be primarily dividing our validated data by. Additionally, take a look at the STATUS column and see if you can find a row that contains a NOTAVAIL value. When working with data, it is always important to become familiar with the data. Keep an eye out for any data that has missing values.

Additionally, we will be using this data as a reference layer for our maps. It is the boundaries of the different regions within Ottawa. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Setting up Your Environment

The first step of this tutorial is going to be how to set up your Python environment in order to complete this tutorial.

- You will need to download Anaconda: https://docs.anaconda.com/anaconda/install/windows/

- Search for and open the Anaconda Prompt

- Create your environment and when prompted, type y to accept:

        $ conda create --name geo_env

- Activate your Anaconda virtual environment by typing:

        $ conda activate geo_env

- Install the first required packaged called geopandas:

        $ conda install geopandas

- Install the second package called matplotlib:

        $ conda install matplotlib

- Install the third package called contextily:

        $ conda install contextily

- Install the last and final package from Anaconda which allows you to map polygons using Geopandas:

        $ conda install -c conda-forge descartes

- Next you will need an integrated development environment (IDE). This tutorial used Visual Studio Code (VS Code) as it is free and accessible. However, other IDEs such as Pycharm can be used. The link to install Visual Studio Code can be found here.

- You will now need to open VS Code and set your interpreter to the virtual geo_env environment you created. You can follow this tutorial.

We finally have our entire Python environment set up!

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Beginning to Code

The first step to begin coding is to import all of our modules:

        import geopandas # For automation and data cleaning of our geojson files
        import os # Allow us to manipulate where we save our files and move around our folders
        import matplotlib.pyplot as plt # Allow us to create maps
        import requests # Allow us to download our data from the City of Ottawa using their API
        from datetime import date # Allow us to generate current dates 
        import contextily as ctx # Allow us to add base maps

The next step is to create our main function, call it and then set up our file structure:

        def main():
        if __name__ == "__main__":
                 main()

In our main function we want to use the datetime module to generate a date object:

        date_today = str(date.today())

Next we want to use the OS module to create our file structure and point towards our reference data. All the blow code will go in our main funcion unless otherwise specified.

        working_directory = os.getcwd() # Find our current working directory in order to build other directories off of this
        reference_file = os.path.join(working_directory, "ottawa_boundaries", "ottawa_boundaries.geojson") # Use OS path.join function to point to our reference file
        reference_folder = os.path.join(working_directory, "ottawa_boundaries" ) # Create a path for our reference folder 
        maps_folder = os.path.join(working_directory, "Maps") # Create a maps folder path
        maps_day_folder = os.path.join(maps_folder, date_today) # Create a specific day path in our general maps path

We will now use the paths we made and test if they exist within where we are running our program. If they are not, we will create them. We test if the directory already exists in order to prevent us from duplicating folders or from creating complications in our script.

        # Check if the overarching maps folder exists and if not, create it
        if not os.path.isdir(maps_folder):
	         os.mkdir(maps_folder)

        # Check if the specific day directory exists and if not, create it
        if not os.path.isdir(maps_day_folder):
                os.mkdir(maps_day_folder)

        # Create GeoJSON folder and add it to repository
        if not os.path.isdir("./geojson"):

os.mkdir("./geojson")

We will now check to see if our reference layer folder exists, if it does not (ie the first time we run this), we will create it and download the layer file from the City of Ottawa. You will notice I use the word datafram in the comments below. a dataframe is the primary type of data structure used to store information in GeoPandas.