geopy sprint at November C³ meeting
After suffering from over a year of poor maintenance, geopy is finally getting some love this month. A few other developers and I will be focusing on geopy at this month’s Cleveland Code Co-op meeting. We’ve come up with an ambitious todo list, including:
- Merging pending patches (bug fixes, Python 2.3 support, accuracy support)
- Adding unit tests
- Reverse geocoding support (finding locations near a point)
- Higher level Points and Locations (instead of tuples and strings)
- Keeping up with third-party geocoder APIs (and hacks)
- A “compound” geocoder for querying multiple geocoders (as fallbacks or for averaging results)
- A parser module with support for geotagged documents (including the Geo microformat), ISO 6709, GPX files, etc.
- Geohash encoding/decoding
- A formatter module for pretty-printing coordinates, distances, and ordinal directions (think “south by southwest”)
setuptoolsentry points to support geocoder plugins and discovery
I think these features are in line with the “geocoding toolbox” goal of the project. While there are a lot of features there, I think geopy will still feel like a nice compact library.
Why does geopy deserve some developer attention? Because it’s being used in numerous interesting ways, including: directing robots at Carnegie Mellon University, calculating stream lengths for the U.S. Geological Survey, and updating address data for the Barack Obama presidential campaign.
We’ll be sprinting on Sunday, November 16th. If anyone would like to join us in person or on IRC, please get in touch!
