As usual, we’ll begin with a half hour (or so) with an informal meet-and-greet — a great chance to catch up with your GIS colleagues, both those you know and those you don’t (yet).

Python scripting for GIS

Ben Coakley, GIS/IT Specialist for the Southern Cayuga Lake Intermunicipal Water Commission

Python is a popular open-source scripting language with a wide variety of applications, but it’s particularly good for working with spatial data. Python has been distributed with ArcGIS for several versions, and is now ESRI’s preferred environment for ArcGIS scripting. There are also libraries for Python which allow you to work with spatial data directly, without using ArcGIS at all.

Ben will show us how to take a set of ArcGIS tasks, use Model Builder to turn it into a Python script, then customize that script and run it without using ArcMap at all. We’ll also take a look at GDAL/OGR, one of the popular spatial libraries for Python, and see how it can be used to read spatial data and perform geoprocessing operations.