Aggregating Variables

Aggregating census data is a pretty common operation, and when working with American Community Survey estimates it’s also necessary to calculate a new margin of error for each derived value. I wrote two functions to accomplish this. For each function you pass in the keys for values you want to aggregate, a name which will be the name of the new variable, and a dictionary that contains all the keys and values that were taken from a database table for a specific geography.

#Functions for summing individual values and calculating margins of error
#for individual values

def calc_sums(keys,name,adict):
    tosum=[]
    for val in keys:
        tosum.append(adict.get(val))
    agg=sum(tosum)
    adict[name]=agg

def calc_moe(keys,name,adict):
    sqrd=[]
    for val in keys:
        item=adict.get(val)
        if item=='':
            pass
        else:
            sqrd.append(item**2)
    moe=round(math.sqrt(sum(sqrd)))
    adict[name]=moe

Later in the script, as we’re looping through all the geographies and gathering the necessary data into dictionaries that represent each data table, we call the function. In this example we’re combining household income brackets so that we don’t have so many categories:

for geog in geodict.keys():

    name=geodict.get(geog)
    filename='zzpuma_' + geog + '.tex'
    folder='puma_rept'
    outpath=os.path.join(folder,filename)
    
    acs1dict=pulltab('b_pumas_2013acs1','GEOID2',geog)
    acs2dict=pulltab('b_pumas_2013acs2','GEOID2',geog)

    calc_sums(['INC03_E','INC04_E'],'INC10K_E',acs1dict)
    calc_moe(['INC03_M','INC04_M'],'INC10K_M',acs1dict)
    calc_sums(['INC05_E','INC06_E'],'INC25K_E',acs1dict)
    calc_moe(['INC05_M','INC06_M'],'INC25K_M',acs1dict)
    calc_sums(['INC09_E','INC10_E'],'INC100K_E',acs1dict)
    calc_moe(['INC09_M','INC10_M'],'INC100K_M',acs1dict)

Rather than creating a new dictionary, these new values are simply appended to the existing dictionaries that contain the data taken from each of the ACS data tables in the database. They can be referenced in the template using their new column name.

Calculating Areas

I also want to include the geographic size of the PUMA as one of the report items. Columns for the area are included in the spatial table for the PUMAs – the features originally came from the TIGER files, and all TIGER files have an ALAND and an AWATER column that has land and water area in square meters. So we don’t have to calculate the area from the geometry – we can just use this function to convert the land and water attributes to square miles, and then calculate a total area:

def calc_area(adict,land,water,total):
    landarea=round(adict.get('aland10')*0.000000386102,2)
    waterarea=round(adict.get('awater10')*0.000000386102,2)
    totalarea=landarea+waterarea
    adict[land]=landarea
    adict[water]=waterarea
    adict[total]=totalarea

In the body of our script, we invoke our pulltab function (explained in an earlier post) to grab all the data from the PUMA spatial boundary table:

area=pulltab('c_bndy_pumas2010','geoid10',geog)

And then we can call our area function. We pass in the area dictionary, and what we want the new output column names to be – area for land, water, and total:

calc_area(area, 'LAND_SQM','WAT_SQM','TOT_SQM') 

Like our previous aggregate script, this function appends our new values to the existing table-dictionary – in this case, one called area.

Aggregating Geographies

Our last function is a little more complicated. In all of our previous examples, we pulled PUMA-level data from the American Community Survey tables. What if we wanted 2010 Census data for the PUMAs? Decennial census data is not tabulated at the PUMA level, but it is tabulated at the census tract level. Since PUMAs are created by aggregating tracts, we can aggregate the census tract data in the NYC Geodatabase into PUMAs. Here’s our function:

#Function aggregates all values in a table with a group by field from a
#joined table, then creates a dictionary consisting of column names and values
#for a specific geography

def sumtab(tabname,jointab,id1,id2,gid,geog):
    query='SELECT * FROM %s LIMIT 1' %(tabname)
    curs.execute(query)
    col_names = [cn[0] for cn in curs.description]
    tosum=[]
    for var in col_names[3:]:
        tosum.append("SUM("+var+") AS '0_"+var+"'")
    summer=', '.join(str(command) for command in tosum)
    query='SELECT %s, %s FROM %s, %s WHERE %s = %s and %s = %s GROUP BY %s' %(gid,summer,tabname,jointab,id1,id2,gid,geog,gid)
    curs.execute(query)
    col_names = [cn[0] for cn in curs.description]
    rows = curs.fetchall()    
    for row in rows:
        thedict=dict(zip(col_names,row))
    return thedict

What’s going on here? The first thing we need to do is associate the census tracts with the PUMAs they’re located in. The NYC Geodatabase does NOT have a relationship table for this, so I had to create one. We have to pass in the table name, the relationship table, the unique IDs for each, and then the ID and the geography that we’re interested in (remember our script is looping through PUMA geographies one by one). The first thing we do is a little trick – we get the names of every column in the existing data table, and we append them to a list where we create a new column name based on the existing one (in this case, append a 0 in front of the column name – in retrospect I realize this is a bad idea as column names should not begin with numbers, so this is something I will change). Then we can take the list of column names and create a giant string out of them.

With that giant string (called summer) we can now pass all of the parameters that we need into the SQL query. This selects all of our columns (using the summer string), the table names and join info, for the specific geographic area that we want and then groups the data by that geography (i.e. all tracts that have the same PUMA number). Then we zip the column names and values together in a dictionary that the function returns.

Later on in our script, we call the function:

    census10=sumtab('b_tracts_2010census','b_tracts_to_pumas','GEOID2','tractid','pumaid',geog) 

Which creates a new dictionary called census10 that has all the 2010 census data for our PUMA. Like the rest of our dictionaries, census10 is passed out to the Jinja2 template and its values can be invoked using the dictionary keys (the column headings):

outfile=open(outpath,'w')
    outfile.write(template.render(geoid=geog, geoname=name, acs1=acs1dict, acs2=acs2dict, area=area,
                                  c2010=census10))   
    outfile.close()

Designing the Template

The Jinja template is going to look pretty busy compared to our earlier examples, and in both cases they’re not complete (this is still a work in progress).

I wanted to design the entire report first, to get a sense for how to balance everything I want on the page, without including any Jinja code to reference specific variables in the database. So I initially worked just in LaTeX and focused on designing the document with placeholders. Ultimately I decided to use the LaTeX minipage environment as it seemed the best approach in giving me control in balancing items on the page. The LaTeX wikibook entries on floats, figures, and captions and on boxes was invaluable for figuring this out. I used rule to draw boxes to serve as placeholders for charts and figures. Since the report is being designed as a document (ANSI A 8 1/2 by 11 inches) I had no hang-up with specifying precise dimensions (i.e. this isn’t going into a webpage that could be stretched or mushed on any number of screens). I loaded the xcolor package so I could modify the row colors of the tables, as well as a number of other packages that make it easy to balance table and figure captions on the page (caption, subscaption, and multicol).

Once I was satisfied with the look and feel, I made a copy of this template and started modifying the copy with the Jinja references. The references look awfully busy, but this is the same thing I’ve illustrated in earlier posts. We’re just getting the values from the dictionaries we created by invoking their keys, regardless of whether we’re taking new derived values that we created or simply pulling existing values that were in the original data tables. Here’s a snippet of the LaTeX with Jinja that includes both derived (2010 Census, area) and existing (ACS) variables:

%Orientation - detail map and basic background info
\begin{minipage}{\textwidth}
	\begin{minipage}[h]{3in}
   		\centering
   		\rule{3in}{3in}
    		\captionof{figure}{Race by 2010 Census Tract}
	\end{minipage}
  	\hfill
	\begin{minipage}[h]{4in}
		\centering
		\captionof{table}{Geography}
    	\begin{tabular}{cccc}\hline
		& Land & Water & Total\\ \hline
		Area (sq miles) &  \num{\VAR{area.get('LAND_SQM')}} & \num {\VAR{area.get('WAT_SQM')}} &  \num {\VAR{area.get('TOT_SQM')}} \\ \hline
		\vspace{10pt}
	 \end{tabular}
	\captionof{table}{Basic Demographics}
	\rowcolors{3}{SpringGreen}{white}
	 \begin{tabular}{cccc}\hline
		& \textbf{2010 Census} & \textbf{2009-2013} & \textbf{ACS Margin}\\ 
		& & \textbf{ACS} & \textbf{of Error}\\ \hline
		Population & \num {\VAR{c2010.get('0_HD01_S001')}} & \num{\VAR{acs2.get('SXAG01_E')}} & +/- \num{\VAR{acs2.get('SXAG01_M')}}\\
		Males & \num {\VAR{c2010.get('0_HD01_S026')}} & \num{\VAR{acs2.get('SXAG02_E')}} & +/- \num{\VAR{acs2.get('SXAG02_M')}}\\
		Females & \num {\VAR{c2010.get('0_HD01_S051')}}& \num{\VAR{acs2.get('SXAG03_E')}} & +/- \num{\VAR{acs2.get('SXAG03_M')}}\\
		Median Age (yrs) & \num {99999} & \num{\VAR{acs2.get('SXAG17_E')}} & +/- \num{\VAR{acs2.get('SXAG17_M')}}\\
		Households & \num {\VAR{c2010.get('0_HD01_S150')}} & \num{\VAR{acs1.get('HSHD01_E')}} & +/- \num{\VAR{acs1.get('HSHD01_M')}}\\
		Housing Units & \num {\VAR{c2010.get('0_HD01_S169')}} & \num{\VAR{acs2.get('HOC01_E')}} & +/- \num{\VAR{acs2.get('HOC01_M')}}\\ \hline
	\end{tabular}      
	\end{minipage}
 \end{minipage}

And here’s a snippet of the resulting PDF:

What Next?

You may have noticed references to figures and charts in some of the code above. I’ll discuss my trials and tribulations with trying to use matplotlib to create charts in some future post. Ultimately I decided not to take that approach, and was experimenting with using various LaTeX packages to produce charts instead.

One of the primary decisions I had to make was how to loop through the database. Since the reports we’re making are profiles (lots of different data for one geographic area), we’re going to want to loop through the database by geography. So, for each geography select all the data from a specific table, pass the data out to the template where the pertinent variables are pulled, build the report and move on to the next geography. In contrast, if we were building comparison tables (one specific variable for many geographic areas) we would want to loop through the data by variable.

In the beginning of the script we import the necessary modules, set up the Jinja environment, and specify our template (not going to repeat that code here – see the previous post). Then we have our function that creates a dictionary for a specific data table for a specific geography:

def pulltab(tabname,idcol,geog):
    query='SELECT * FROM %s WHERE %s = %s' %(tabname,idcol,geog)
    curs.execute(query)
    col_names = [cn[0] for cn in curs.description]
    rows = curs.fetchall()
    for row in rows:
        thedict=dict(zip(col_names,row))
    return thedict

We connect to the database and create a dictionary of all the geographies (limited to 3 PUMAs since this is just a test):

#Connect to database and create dictionary of all geographies
    
conn = sqlite3.connect('nyc_gdb_jan2015a/nyc_gdb_jan2015.sqlite')
curs = conn.cursor()
curs.execute('SELECT geoid10, namelsad10 FROM a_pumas2010 ORDER BY geoid10 LIMIT 3')
rows = curs.fetchall()
geodict=dict(rows)

And then we generate reports by looping through all the geographies in that dictionary, and we pass in the ID of each geography to pull all data from a data table for that geography out of the table and into a dictionary.

#Generate reports by looping through geographies and passing out
#dictionaries of values

for geog in geodict.keys():
    acs1dict=pulltab('b_pumas_2013acs1','GEOID2',geog)
    acs2dict=pulltab('b_pumas_2013acs2','GEOID2',geog)
    name=geodict.get(geog)
    filename='zzpuma_' + geog + '.tex'
    folder='test5'
    outpath=os.path.join(folder,filename)

Lastly, we pass the dictionaries out to the template, and run LaTeX to generate the report from the template:

  outfile=open(outpath,'w')
    outfile.write(template.render(geoid=geog, geoname=name, acs1=acs1dict, acs2=acs2dict))   
    outfile.close()
    
    os.system("pdflatex -output-directory=" + folder + " " + outpath)

conn.close()

The Jinja template (as a LaTeX file) is below – the example here is similar to what I covered in my previous post. We passed two dictionaries into the template, one for each data table. The key is the name of the variable (the column name in the table) and the value is the American Community Survey estimate and the margin of error. We pass in the key and get the value in return. The PDF output follows.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[margin=0.5in]{geometry}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage[labelformat=empty]{caption}
\usepackage[group-separator={,}]{siunitx}

\title{\VAR{acs1.get('GEOLABEL') | replace("&","\&")} \VAR{acs1.get('GEOID2')}}
\date{}

\begin{document}

\maketitle
\pagestyle{empty}
\thispagestyle{empty}  

\begin{table}[h]
\centering
\caption{Commuting to Work - Workers 16 years and over}
\begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|c|c|}

\hline
& Estimate & Margin of Error & Percent Total & Margin of Error\\
\hline

Car, truck, or van alone & \num{\VAR{acs1.get('COM02_E')}} & +/- \num{\VAR{acs1.get('COM02_M')}} 
& \num{\VAR{acs1.get('COM02_PC')}} & +/- \num{\VAR{acs1.get('COM02_PM')}}\\

Car, truck, or van carpooled & \num{\VAR{acs1.get('COM03_E')}} & +/- \num{\VAR{acs1.get('COM03_M')}} 
& \num{\VAR{acs1.get('COM03_PC')}} & +/- \num{\VAR{acs1.get('COM03_PM')}}\\

Public transit & \num{\VAR{acs1.get('COM04_E')}} & +/- \num{\VAR{acs1.get('COM04_M')}} 
& \num{\VAR{acs1.get('COM04_PC')}} & +/- \num{\VAR{acs1.get('COM04_PM')}}\\

Walked & \num{\VAR{acs1.get('COM05_E')}} & +/- \num{\VAR{acs1.get('COM05_M')}} 
& \num{\VAR{acs1.get('COM05_PC')}} & +/- \num{\VAR{acs1.get('COM05_PM')}}\\

Other means & \num{\VAR{acs1.get('COM06_E')}} & +/- \num{\VAR{acs1.get('COM06_M')}} 
& \num{\VAR{acs1.get('COM06_PC')}} & +/- \num{\VAR{acs1.get('COM06_PM')}}\\

Worked at home & \num{\VAR{acs1.get('COM07_E')}} & +/- \num{\VAR{acs1.get('COM07_M')}} 
& \num{\VAR{acs1.get('COM07_PC')}} & +/- \num{\VAR{acs1.get('COM07_PM')}}\\
\hline

\end{tabular}
\end{table}

\begin{table}[h]
\centering
\caption{Housing Tenure}
\begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|c|c|}

\hline
& Estimate & Margin of Error & Percent Total & Margin of Error\\
\hline

Occupied housing units & \num{\VAR{acs2.get('HTEN01_E')}} & +/- \num{\VAR{acs2.get('HTEN01_M')}} &  &\\

Owner-occupied & \num{\VAR{acs2.get('HTEN02_E')}} & +/- \num{\VAR{acs2.get('HTEN02_M')}} 
& \num{\VAR{acs2.get('HTEN02_PC')}} & +/- \num{\VAR{acs2.get('HTEN02_PM')}}\\

Renter-occupied & \num{\VAR{acs2.get('HTEN03_E')}} & +/- \num{\VAR{acs2.get('HTEN03_M')}} 
& \num{\VAR{acs2.get('HTEN03_PC')}} & +/- \num{\VAR{acs2.get('HTEN03_PM')}}\\
\hline

\end{tabular}
\end{table}
\end{document}

In this example we took the simple approach of grabbing all the variables that were in a particular table, and then we just selected what we wanted within the template. This is fine since we’re only dealing with 55 PUMAs and a table that has 200 columns or so. If we were dealing with gigantic tables or tons of geographies, we could modify the Python script to pull just the variables we wanted to speed up the process; my inclination would be to create a list of variables in a text file, read that list into the script and modify the SQL function to just select those variables.

What if we want to modify some of the variables before we pass them into the template? I’ll cover that in the next post.

Standard Elements – Used Each Time

First – the Python script. For each iteration, the top half of the script remains the same. I import the necessary modules, and I set up my Jinja2 environment. This tells Jinja how to handle LaTeX syntax. I borrowed this code directly from the invaluable slides posted here. The only part that gets modified each time is the .get_template() bit, which is the actual LaTeX template with Jinja mark-up that is used for creating the reports.

import sqlite3

import jinja2
import os
from jinja2 import Template

latex_jinja_env = jinja2.Environment(
    block_start_string = '\BLOCK{',
    block_end_string = '}',
    variable_start_string = '\VAR{',
    variable_end_string = '}',
    comment_start_string = '\#{',
    comment_end_string = '}',
    line_statement_prefix = '%-',
    line_comment_prefix = '%#',
    trim_blocks = True,
    autoescape = False,
    loader = jinja2.FileSystemLoader(os.path.abspath('.'))
)
# Modify to specify the template
template = latex_jinja_env.get_template('test1.tex')

The method for connecting to a SQLite database is also the same each time. There are a zillion tutorials and posts for working with Python and SQLite so I won’t belabor that here. Take a look at this excellent one or this awesome one.

conn = sqlite3.connect('nyc_gdb_jan2015a/nyc_gdb_jan2015.sqlite')
curs = conn.cursor()
curs.execute('SELECT * FROM b_pumas_2013acs1 ORDER BY GEOID2 LIMIT 3')

col_names = [cn[0] for cn in curs.description]
rows = curs.fetchall()
conn.close()

First Iteration – Pass Individual Variables to the Template

Here’s the bit that I modify each time. Using the example from the tutorial slides, I loop through the rows returned from my database, and I specify individual variables each time by slicing the elements in the row and assigning them a name which is passed out to the template with template.render(). Then I make a call to LaTeX to generate the PDF file (straightforward since I’m using Linux), one for each row (which represent geographic areas). Each file is named using the unique ID number of the geography, which we grabbed from our row list.

for row in rows:
    filename='zpuma_' + row[0] + '.tex'
    folder='test1'
    outpath=os.path.join(folder,filename)    
    outfile=open(outpath,'w')
    outfile.write(template.render(geoid=row[0], geolabel=row[1], hshld=row[2], hshldmoe=row[3]))
    outfile.close()
    os.system("pdflatex -output-directory=" + folder + " " + outpath)

That’s the Python piece. The LaTeX template with the Jinja mark-up looks like this:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[margin=0.5in]{geometry}
\usepackage[group-separator={,}]{siunitx}

\title{\VAR{geolabel | replace("&","\&")} \VAR{geoid}}
\date{}

\begin{document}

\maketitle
\pagestyle{empty}
\thispagestyle{empty}  

\begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|}
\hline
& Estimate & Margin of Error\\
Households: & \num{\VAR{hshld}} & +/- \num{\VAR{hshldmoe}}\\
\hline
\end{tabular}

\end{document}

You can see here where I’m passing in the variables with \VAR – I’m using the same variable names that I created in the script to hold the row elements. I have to do a little bit of formatting to get this to work. First, one of my variables is text description that consistently contains an ampersand, so I have to use replace (a construct from Jinja) to replace & with \& so LaTeX can properly escape it. Second, I want to format my numeric variables with a thousands separator. Here I use a LaTeX construct with the siunitx package, and every place a number appears I mark it with \num. For this to work I always need to know that this variable will be a number; if it’s text or null LaTeX will throw an error and the doc won’t compile (an alternative to using this LaTeX solution would be to use Python’s formatting constructs). My simple output is below.

Second Iteration – Pass Variables to Template in a List

Since I’m going to be passing lots of variables out to my template, it would be tedious if I had to declare them all individually, one by one. It would be better if I could pass out an entire list, and then do the slicing to get what I want in the template. Here’s the Python for doing that:

for row in rows:
    filename='zzpuma_' + row[0] + '.tex'
    folder='test2'
    outpath=os.path.join(folder,filename)    
    outfile=open(outpath,'w')
    outfile.write(template.render(thelist=row))
    outfile.close()
    os.system("pdflatex -output-directory=" + folder + " " + outpath)

And here’s the LaTeX template – in this example I modified the variables a bit.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[margin=0.5in]{geometry}
\usepackage[group-separator={,}]{siunitx}

\title{\VAR{thelist[2] | replace("&","\&")} \VAR{thelist[1]}}
\date{}

\begin{document}

\maketitle
\pagestyle{empty}
\thispagestyle{empty}  

\begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|c|c|}
\hline
& Estimate & Margin of Error & Percent Total & Percent Margin of Error\\
Car, truck, or van alone: & \num{\VAR{thelist[171]}} & +/- \num{\VAR{thelist[172]}} & \num{\VAR{thelist[173]}} & +/- \num{\VAR{thelist[174]}}\\
Car, truck, or van carpooled: & \num{\VAR{thelist[175]}} & +/- \num{\VAR{thelist[176]}} & \num{\VAR{thelist[177]}} & +/- \num{\VAR{thelist[178]}}\\
\hline
\end{tabular}

\end{document}

While this is a bit better, the template is harder to read – you can’t really figure out what’s in there as you just have a bunch of list slices. You also have to keep careful track of which indices apply to what element, so you know what you’re generating. I thought I could improve this by creating nested lists where the column headings from the database get carried along, and I could reference them somehow. Then I had a better idea.

Third Iteration – Pass Variables to Template in a Dictionary

I decided to use a dictionary instead of a list. Here’s the Python – since I grabbed the columns back in the database section of my code, I can loop through the elements in each row and create a dictionary by zipping the column names and row elements together, so the column name becomes the key and the row element is my data value. Then I pass the whole dictionary out to the template.

for row in rows:
    thedict=dict(zip(col_names,row))
    filename='zzpuma_' + row[0] + '.tex'
    folder='test3'
    outpath=os.path.join(folder,filename)    
    outfile=open(outpath,'w')
    outfile.write(template.render(d=thedict))
    outfile.close()
    os.system("pdflatex -output-directory=" + folder + " " + outpath)

Now in the template, using Jinja I embed dict.get() for each variable and specify the key (column name) and the output will be the value. This is now highly readable, as I can see the names of the columns for the variables and there’s less potential for a mix-up.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[margin=0.5in]{geometry}
\usepackage[group-separator={,}]{siunitx}

\title{\VAR{d.get('GEOLABEL') | replace("&","\&")} \VAR{d.get('GEOID2')}}
\date{}

\begin{document}

\maketitle
\pagestyle{empty}
\thispagestyle{empty}  

\begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|c|c|}
\hline
& Estimate & Margin of Error & Percent Total & Margin of Error\\

Car, truck, or van alone: & \num{\VAR{d.get('COM02_E')}} & +/- \num{\VAR{d.get('COM02_M')}} & \num{\VAR{d.get('COM02_PC')}} & +/- \num{\VAR{d.get('COM02_PM')}}\\

Car, truck, or van carpooled: & \num{\VAR{d.get('COM03_E')}} & +/- \num{\VAR{d.get('COM03_M')}} & \num{\VAR{d.get('COM03_PC')}} & +/- \num{\VAR{d.get('COM03_PM')}}\\
\hline
\end{tabular}

\end{document}

In this case, the output looks the same as it did in our last iteration. Those are some basic methods for getting data into a template, and in my case I think the dictionary is the ideal data structure for this. In going further, my goal is to keep all the formatting and presentation issues in LaTeX, and all the data processing and selection pieces in Python.

I finally have time to devote to this, and am going to share what I’m learning in a series of posts. In this post I’ll describe how I got started, and will record some useful projects and posts that I’ve found.

Figuring Out What the Pieces Are

In searching the web for building reports in Python, I’ve discovered a number of solutions. Many people have written modules that are in various states of production, from active to defunct. Prettytable was something I’ve used for generating basic text-file reports. It’s absolutely great at what it does, but I’m looking for something that’s more robust. Of all the tools out there, ReportLab seemed to be the most prominent package that would appear again and again. I’ve shied away from it, because I wanted a solution that was a little more general – if that makes sense. Something where every component is not so tightly bound to a specific module.

Luckily I found this post, which was perfect for helping me to understand conceptually what I wanted to do. The author describes how he automatically generates song sheets by using a programming language (JAVA in this case) to reach into a database and insert the content into a template (LaTeX in this case) using a template engine (Apache Velocity) to produce good looking output. In this case, the template has the shell of a document and place-holders where variables will be passed in from the scripting language and rendered using the engine. He included this helpful diagram from wikimedia in his post:

I started looking for a template engine that would work well with both LaTeX and Python. The author had mentioned Cheetah as another engine, and it turns out that Cheetah is often used in conjunction with Python and LaTeX. After digging around some more, I discovered another template engine called Jinja (or Jinja2) which I’ve adopted as my solution, largely because I’ve found that the project documentation was quite good and there are numerous user examples that I can follow. Jinja2 allows you to do much more than simply passing variables into the template and rendering it; you have the option to run a lot of Pythonesque code from within the template itself.

Putting the Pieces Together

While Jinja is often used for generating HTML and XML (for example), it’s also used for LaTeX (for example). I found that this series of slides was the perfect introduction for me. They’re written in German, but since most of the syntax in the scripting and mark-up languages is in English it’s easy to grasp (and those three-years of German I took way back in high school are now reaping dividends!)

The slides break down how you can use Python to generate LaTeX reports in several iterations. The first iteration involves no templating at all – you simply use Python to generate the LaTeX code that you want (or if you prefer, Python serves as the template generator). The limit of this are obvious, in that you have to hard code variables into the output, or use string substitution to find and replace variable names with the intended output. In the next iteration, he demonstrates how to use Jinja2. This section is invaluable, as it provides an example of setting the Jinja2 environment so that you can escape all of the necessary characters and syntax that LaTeX needs to function. He demonstrates how to pass a variable from Python to render in a template that you create in LaTeX and mark-up with Jinja2 code (slides 18 to 20). He goes on to show how you can loop through lists to generate output.

The third iteration displays how you can pull data out of SQLite and then use Python and LaTeX to generate output. With a little imagination, you can combine this piece with his previous one and voila, you have a SQLite-Python-Jinja-Latex combo. He has a final piece that incorporates screen-scraping using Beautiful Soup, which is pretty neat but beyond my needs for this project.

Now that I understand the conceptual model and I have the four tools I’ll use with some examples, I’m ready to start experimenting. I know there will be several additional pieces I’ll need to incorporate, to generate charts (matplotlib) and maps (perhaps some of the Python modules from QGIS). There are some instances where I’ll also have to write functions to create derivatives of the data I’m pulling, so I imagine NumPy/SciPy and GDAL will come in handy for that. But first things first – I need to get the four basic pieces – SQLite – Python – Jinja2 – LaTeX – working together. That will be the topic of my next post.

Python has a built-in module, sqlite3, that you can use to work with SQLite databases. This is pretty well documented – do a search and you’ll find a ton of brief tutorials. Take a look at this great post for a comprehensive intro.

For generating reports I gave prettytable a shot: it lets you create nice looking ASCII text tables that you can copy and paste from the prompt or export out to a file. The tutorial for the module was pretty clear and covers the basics quite nicely. In the examples he directly embeds the data in the script and generates the table from it, which makes the tutorial readily understandable. For my purposes I wanted to pull data out of a SQLite database and into a formatted table, so that’s what I’ll demonstrate here.

Initially I had some trouble getting the module to load, primarily (I think) because I’m using Python 3.x and the setup file for the module was written for Python 2.x; the utility you use for importing 3rd party modules has changed between versions. I’m certainly no Python expert, so instead of figuring it out I just downloaded the module, dumped it into the site-packages folder (as suggested in the prettytable installation instructions under “The Harder Way” – but it wasn’t hard at all) and unzipped it. In my script I couldn’t get the simple “import prettytable” to work without throwing an error, but when I added the name of the specific function “import PrettyTable from prettytable” it worked. Your mileage may vary.

So here was my first go at it. I created a test database and loaded a table of population estimates from the US Census Bureau into it (you can download it if you want to experiment):

from prettytable import PrettyTable
import sqlite3

conn = sqlite3.connect('pop_test.sqlite')
curs = conn.cursor()
curs.execute('SELECT State, Name, ESTIMATESBASE2010 AS Est2010 FROM pop_est WHERE region="1" ORDER BY Name')

col_names = [cn[0] for cn in curs.description]
rows = curs.fetchall()

x = PrettyTable(col_names)
x.align[col_names[1]] = "l" 
x.align[col_names[2]] = "r" 
x.padding_width = 1    
for row in rows:
    x.add_row(row)

print (x)
tabstring = x.get_string()

output=open("export.txt","w")
output.write("Population Data"+"\n")
output.write(tabstring)
output.close()

conn.close()

The first piece is the standard SQLite piece – connect, activate a cursor, and execute a SQL statement. Here I’m grabbing three columns from the table for records that represent Northeastern states (Region 1). I read in the names of the columns from the first row into the col_names list, and I grab everything else and dump them into rows, a list that contains a tuple for each record:

>>> col_names
['State', 'Name', 'Est2010']
>>> rows
[('09', 'Connecticut', 3574097), ('23', 'Maine', 1328361), ('25', 'Massachusetts', 6547629),
 ('33', 'New Hampshire', 1316469), ('34', 'New Jersey', 8791898), ('36', 'New York', 19378104),
 ('42', 'Pennsylvania', 12702379), ('44', 'Rhode Island', 1052567), ('50', 'Vermont', 625741)]
>>> 

The second piece will make sense after you have a quick look at the prettytable tutorial. Here I grab the list of columns names and specify how cells for the columns should be aligned (default is center) and padded (default is one space). Then I add each row from the nested list of tuples to the table, row by row. There are two outputs: print directly to the screen, and dump the whole table into a string. That string can then be dumped into a text file, along with a title. Here’s the screen output:

+-------+---------------+----------+
| State | Name          |  Est2010 |
+-------+---------------+----------+
|   09  | Connecticut   |  3574097 |
|   23  | Maine         |  1328361 |
|   25  | Massachusetts |  6547629 |
|   33  | New Hampshire |  1316469 |
|   34  | New Jersey    |  8791898 |
|   36  | New York      | 19378104 |
|   42  | Pennsylvania  | 12702379 |
|   44  | Rhode Island  |  1052567 |
|   50  | Vermont       |   625741 |
+-------+---------------+----------+

The one hangup I had was the formatting for the numbers: I really want some commas in there since the values are so large. I couldn’t figure out how to do this using the approach above – I’m writing all the rows in one swoop, and couldn’t step in and and format the last value for each row.

Unless – instead of constructing the table by rows, I construct it by columns. Here’s my second go at it:

from prettytable import PrettyTable
import sqlite3

conn = sqlite3.connect('pop_test.sqlite')
curs = conn.cursor()
curs.execute('SELECT State, Name, ESTIMATESBASE2010 AS Est2010 FROM pop_est WHERE region="1" ORDER BY Name')

col_names = [cn[0] for cn in curs.description]
rows = curs.fetchall()

y=PrettyTable()
y.padding_width = 1
y.add_column(col_names[0],[row[0] for row in rows])
y.add_column(col_names[1],[row[1] for row in rows])
y.add_column(col_names[2],[format(row[2],',d') for row in rows])
y.align[col_names[1]]="l"
y.align[col_names[2]]="r"

print(y)
tabstring = y.get_string()

output=open("export.txt","w")
output.write("Population Data"+"\n")
output.write(tabstring)
output.close()

conn.close()

To add by column, you don’t provide any arguments to the PrettyTable function. You just add the columns one by one: here I call the appropriate values using the index, first for the column name and then for all of the values from the rows that are in the same position. For the last value (the population estimate) I use format to display the value like a decimal number (this works in Python 3.1+ – for earlier versions there’s a similar command – see this post for details). I tried this in my first example but I couldn’t get the format to stick, or got an error. Since I’m specifically calling these row values and then writing them I was able to get it to work in this second example. In this version the alignment specifications have to come last. Here’s the result:

+-------+---------------+------------+
| State | Name          |    Est2010 |
+-------+---------------+------------+
|   09  | Connecticut   |  3,574,097 |
|   23  | Maine         |  1,328,361 |
|   25  | Massachusetts |  6,547,629 |
|   33  | New Hampshire |  1,316,469 |
|   34  | New Jersey    |  8,791,898 |
|   36  | New York      | 19,378,104 |
|   42  | Pennsylvania  | 12,702,379 |
|   44  | Rhode Island  |  1,052,567 |
|   50  | Vermont       |    625,741 |
+-------+---------------+------------+

prettytable gives you a few other options, like the ability to sort records by a certain column or to return only the first “n” records from a table. In this example, since we’re pulling the data from a database we could (and did) specify sorting and other constraints in the SQL statement instead. prettytable also gives you the option of exporting the table as HTML, which can certainly come in handy.

In SQLite, the ALTER TABLE statement is limited to changing the name of a table or adding new columns. If you want to make any other changes, the process is: create a new, blank table that’s structured the way you want, and then write an INSERT statement to copy the data you want from the existing table into the new table. So if you have a table that has a bunch of columns you want to drop or change, create a new table that has your desired structure, then insert what you want into that new table. The same thing goes for primary keys or other constraints. If your existing table doesn’t have a specified key you can’t alter it by specifying one: create a new table that does, then copy your data over.

Let’s say we have this table (de_data) with basic population data for Delaware’s three counties:

USPS	GEOID	NAME			POP10	HU10	ALAND_SQMI	AWATER_SQMI
DE	10001	Kent County		162310	65338	586.179		212.152
DE	10003	New Castle County	538479	217511	426.286		67.717
DE	10005	Sussex County		197145	123036	936.079		260.312

And let’s say that we want to change some of the column names, drop the field for housing units, and specify our data types and GEOID as our key. First, create the table:

CREATE TABLE de_pop (STATE TEXT, GEOID TEXT NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
COUNTY TEXT, POP10 INTEGER, ALAND REAL, AWATER REAL)

GEOID is the FIPS/ANSI code that uniquely identifies each state. Since these codes may have leading zeros (the codes for all states from AL through CT do), we designate it as text.

Second, insert the data we want from the existing table:

INSERT INTO de_pop (STATE, GEOID, COUNTY, POP10, ALAND, AWATER)
SELECT USPS, GEOID, NAME, POP10, ALAND_SQMI, AWATER_SQMI
FROM de_data

Order here matters – it’s going to insert columns from the original table into the new one in sequence: USPS into STATE, GEOID into GEOID, etc. Sometimes it’s possible to use an * as a shortcut to insert and copy everything, instead of listing every field, if both tables contain the same number of columns and they’re in the right order. But this is always a bit risky.

Lastly, if we don’t need that original table we could delete it:

DROP TABLE de_data

SELECT * FROM de_pop

STATE	GEOID	COUNTY			POP10	ALAND	AWATER
DE	10001	Kent County		162310	586.179	212.152
DE	10003	New Castle County	538479	426.286	67.717
DE	10005	Sussex County		197145	936.079	260.312

The process is similar if we want to take a query or view and turn it into a permanent table. SQLite does support CREATE TABLE AS, followed by a select query, so you can create a table out of a query. However – this is usually NOT the best course of action. If you do this, you won’t be able to specify a primary key for the new table (you really never want a table that lacks a key). Furthermore, if you create a new, calculated field you won’t be able to specify a type for it. This is particularly a problem if you’re working in Spatialite and want to create a spatial view or table that you want to join to some features and map in QGIS. If no type is specified, QGIS won’t know how to handle that new field, and it will be unviewable.

So, we take the same approach as before. Let’s say we want to create a table with population density as a calculated field. First, create the table:

CREATE TABLE de_popdens (STATE TEXT, GEOID TEXT NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
COUNTY TEXT, POP10 INTEGER, ALAND REAL, AWATER REAL, POPDENS REAL)

Then we write our insert statement, and in the insert we create the calculated field:

INSERT INTO de_popdens (STATE, GEOID, COUNTY, POP10, ALAND, AWATER, POPDENS)
SELECT STATE, GEOID, COUNTY, POP10, ALAND, AWATER, (ROUND(POP10/ALAND),1)
FROM de_pop

SELECT * FROM de_density:

STATE	GEOID	COUNTY			POP10	ALAND	AWATER	POPDENS
DE	10001	Kent County		162310	586.179	212.152	276.9
DE	10003	New Castle County	538479	426.286	67.717	1263.2
DE	10005	Sussex County		197145	936.079	260.312	210.6

This gives us a new table with density properly typed. Once again, this is only necessary if you want the calculated field to be permanent and function with other objects in the database, and particularly if you want to join this table to a geodatabase feature or shapefile to map the attributes. If you simply want the new field to answer a specific question or to export the data to output, you can just do a SELECT query and save it as a view.

I also had to do this procedure for every table and shapefile that I imported to the geodatabase. In the Spatialite GUI you don’t have the option to specify a primary key or data types for columns when you do an import; for the latter it takes its best guess. So to get it well-structured, I imported (or created a virtual link), created a new table, inserted the data over, then deleted the original table or severed the link. If it was a shapefile I went through the extra step of activating the geometry (check out the Spatialite Cookbook or the tutorial I wrote for the NYC geodatabase for details).

Since I was dealing with some enormous tables with hundreds of columns, I used some trickery to avoid typing all the statements by hand. If the data was small enough and came from a spreadsheet, I used a series of concatenate formulas to build the CREATE TABLE and INSERT statements by copying the field names and stringing them together with type names and necessary syntax, so I could just copy and paste a statement into the SQL dialog box. For larger datasets I used Python to do the processing, and had Python grab field names and write statements that I could copy and paste.

The import issue was particular to the Spatialite GUI, and not SQLite in general. If you’re dealing with just data tables and use the SQLite Manager (Firefox plugin), it asks you to specify column names, keys and constraints, and types for the columns you’re importing. It does the latter by having you select from a dropdown box for each column – this works fine if you have 10 or 20 columns, but it’s rather tedious if you have hundreds. The Manager also gives you the ability to alter additional elements of the table, like column names, by essentially performing the same operations (create table, insert records, drop table) behind the scenes while holding things temporarily in memory. It prefaces this with a warning message that this operation is not part of the standard SQLite commands, and there’s a chance something could go awry.

Second, for people who are already familiar with GIS and who have various projects to work on (like me) this saves a lot of duplicated effort, as the db provides a foundation to build on and saves the trouble of starting from scratch each time.

Third, it gave me something new to learn and will allow me to build a second part to my open source GIS workshops. I finally sat down and hammered away with Spatialite (went through the Spatialite Cookbook from start to finish) and learned spatial SQL, so I could offer a resource that’s open source and will compliment my QGIS workshop. I was familiar with the Access personal geodatabases in ArcGIS, but for the most part these serve as simple containers. With the ability to run all the spatial SQL operations, Spatialite expands QGIS functionality, which was something I was really looking for.

My original hope was to create a server-based PostGIS database, but at this point I’m not set up to do that on my campus. I figured Spatialite was a good alternative – the basic operations and spatial SQL commands are relatively the same, and I figured I could eventually scale up to PostGIS when the time comes.

I also created an identical, MS Access version of the database for ArcGIS users. Once I got my features in Spatialite I exported them all out as shapefiles and imported them all via ArcCatalog – not too arduous as I don’t have a ton of features. I used the SQLite ODBC driver to import all of my data tables from SQLite into Access – that went flawlessly and was a real time saver; it just took a little bit of time to figure out how to set up (but this blog post helped).

The databases are focused on NYC features and resources, since that’s what my user base is primarily interested in. I purposefully used the Census TIGER files as the base, so that if people wanted to expand the features to the broader region they easily could. I spent a good deal of time creating generalized layers, so that users would have the primary water / coastline and large parks and wildlife areas as reference features for thematic maps, without having every single pond and patch of grass to clutter things up. I took several features (schools, subway stations, etc) from the City and the MTA that were stored in tables and converted them to point features so they’re readily useable.

Given that focus, it’s primarily of interest to NYC folks, but I figured it may be useful for others who wish to experiment with Spatialite. I assumed that most people who would be interested in the database would not be familiar with this format, so I wrote a tutorial that covers the database and it’s features, how to add and map data in QGIS, how to work with the data and do SQL / spatial SQL in the Spatialite GUI, and how to map data in ArcGIS using the Access Geodb. It’s Creative Commons, Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-alike, so feel free to give it a try.

I spent a good amount of time building a process rather than just a product, so I’ll be able to update the db twice a year, as city features (schools, libraries, hospitals, transit) change and new census data (American Community Survey, ZIP Business Patterns) is released. Many of the Census features, as well as the 2010 Census data, will be static until 2020.

• sub_commuters is a census data table for all PUMAs in NY State
  • [SUBWAY] field that has the labor force that commutes by subway
  • [WORKERS_16] field with the total labor force
  • [SUB_PER] a calculated field with the % of labor force that commutes by subway
  • [GEO_ID2] the primary key field, FIPS code that is the unqiue identifier
• nyc_pumas is a feature class with all PUMAs in NYC
  • [PUMA5ID00] is the primary key field, FIPS code that is the unqiue identifier
• pumas_nyc_subcom is the data table that results from joining sub_commuters and nyc_pumas; it can be converted to a feature class for mapping

Spreadsheet

The first method would be to add the calculated field to the data after downloading it from the census in a spreadsheet, as part of the cleaning / preparation stage. You could then save it as a delimited text file for import to SpatiaLite. No magic there, so I’ll skip to the second method.

SpatiaLite

The second method would be to create the calculated field in the SpatiaLite database. I’ll go through the steps I used to figure this out. The basic SQL select query:

SELECT *, (SUBWAY / WORKERS_16) AS SUB_PER FROM sub_commuters

This gives us the proper result, but there are two problems. First, the data in my SUBWAY and WORKERS_16 field are stored as integers, and when you divide the result is rounded to the nearest whole number. Not very helpful here, as my percentage results get rounded to 0 or 1. There are many ways to work around this: set the numeric fields as double, real, or float in the spreadsheet before import (didn’t work for me), specify the field types when importing (didn’t get that option with the SpatiaLite GUI, but maybe you can with the command line), add * 100 to the expression to multiply the percentage to a whole number (ok unless you need decimals in your result) or use the CAST operator. CAST converts the current data type of a field to a specified data type in the result of the expression. So:

SELECT *, (CAST (SUBWAY AS REAL)/ CAST(WORKERS_16 AS REAL)) AS SUB_PER FROM sub_commuters

This gave me the percentages with several decimal places (since we’re casting the fields as real instead of integer), which is what I needed. The second problem is that this query just produces a temporary view; in order to map this data, we need to create a new table to make the calculated field permanent and join it to a feature class. Here’s how we do that:

CREATE TABLE pumas_nyc_subcom AS
SELECT *, (CAST (SUBWAY AS REAL)/ CAST(WORKERS_16 AS REAL)) AS SUB_PER
FROM sub_commuters, nyc_pumas
WHERE nyc_pumas.PUMA5ID00=sub_commuters.geo_id2

The CREATE TABLE AS statement let’s us create a new table from the existing two tables – the data table of subway commuters and the feature class table for NYC PUMAs. We select all the fields in both while throwing in the new calculated field, and we join the data table to the feature class all in one step, and via the join we end up with just data from NYC (the data for the rest of the state gets dropped). After that, it’s just a matter of taking our new table and enabling the geometry to make it a feature class (as explained in the previous post).

This seems like it should work – but I discovered another problem. The resulting calculated field that has the percentage of subway commuters per PUMA, SUB_PER, has no data type associated with it. Looking at the schema for the table in SpatiaLite shows that the data type is blank. If I bring this into QGIS, I’m not able to map this field as a numeric value, because QGIS doesn’t know what it is. I have to define the data type for this field. SpatiaLite (SQLite really) doesn’t allow you to re-define an existing field – we have to create and define a new blank field, and the set the value of our calculated field equal to it. Here are the SQL statements to make it all happen:

ALTER TABLE sub_commuters ADD SUB_PER REAL

UPDATE sub_commuters SET SUB_PER=(CAST (SUBWAY AS REAL)/ CAST(WORKERS_16 AS REAL))

CREATE TABLE pumas_nyc_subcom AS
SELECT * FROM sub_commuters, nyc_pumas
WHERE nyc_pumas.PUMA5ID00=sub_commuters.geo_id2

So, we add a new blank field to our data table and define it as real. Then we update our data table by seting that blank field equal to our expression, thus filling the field with the result of our expression. Once we have the defined calculated field, we can create a new table from the data plus the features based on the ID they share in common. Once the table is created, then we can activate the geometry (right click on geometry field in the feature class and activate – see previous post for details) so we can map it in QGIS. Phew!

QGIS

The third method is to create the calculated field within QGIS, using the new field calculator. It’s pretty easy to do – you select the layer in the table of contents and go into an edit mode. Open the attribute table for the features and click the last button in the row of buttons underneath the table – this is the field calculator button. Once we’re in the field calculator window, we can choose to update an existing field or create a new field. We give the output field a name and a data type, enter our expression SUBWAY / WORKERS_16, hit OK, and we have our new field. Save the edits and we should be good to go. HOWEVER – I wasn’t able to add a calculated fields to features in a SpatiaLite geodatabase without getting errors. I posted to the QGIS forum – initially it was thought that the SpatiaLite driver was read only, but it turns out that’s not the case and so and the developers are investigating a possible bug. The investigation continues – stay tuned. I have tried the field calculator with shapefiles and it works perfectly (incidentally, you can export SpatiaLite features out of the database as shapefiles).

I’m providing the database I created here for download, if anyone wants to experiment.

Fire up the GUI, and create a new, empty geodatabase under the File menu.Once we have a container, we can hit the load a shapefile button. I have a census PUMA layer for NYC that I’ve formatted by erasing water features. Click load, go to the path, give the file a nice brief name, and specify the SRID – the EPSG code that specifies what coordinate system my shapefile is in. In this case, it’s 4269 as the layer is in NAD83 (you can check your files by opening the prj file in a text editor or by using the OGR tools).

Once it’s loaded, you can expand the listing in the table of contents to see all the field names of the feature, and you can right click on it and choose the edit option to see all of the data in the attribute table.

Next we can load a data table. I have a 2006-2008 ACS census table in tab-delimited text format that I’ve pre-formatted. The table has the number of workers (labor force age 16+) and number of workers who commuted to work via the subway for every PUMA in the State of New York (it’s faster to download the whole state and filter out the city PUMAs later). Hit the load txt/csv button, specify a path, a new table name (subway_commuters), the delimiter used, and load the table. It’s given a different icon in the table of contents (toc), to distinguish a regular data table from a feature class.

The next step is to join them together; I already insured that they both share a common, unique identifier; a FIPS code that has a state and PUMA code. If I run a standard SELECT query I can join the tables in a temporary view – but that’s not what I want. I can save the query as a view, but I won’t be able to access the view within QGIS (at least not with this current stable version of SpatialLite, 2.31). What we have to do here is create a brand new table that combines both the puma feature class and the subway commuter table (referred to in Microsoft Access land as a Make Table Query). Here’s the SQL that we type in the command window:

CREATE TABLE pumas_nyc_subcom AS
SELECT *
FROM nyc_pumas, sub_commuters
WHERE PUMA5ID00=GEO_ID2

Execute the query, and we get a message that an empty results set was generated. Uh, ok. But then if we select the database path at the top of the TOC , right-click, and refresh, we’ll see our new combined table, pumas_nyc_subcom, and we can expand it and take a look at the data. The join worked, but we’re not done yet. Right now this is just a regular old data table (notice the icon?) We have to turn this into a feature class next.

Expand the fields for the new table in the TOC, select the Geometry field, right click, and check the geometry. We’ll see that it’s MULTIPOLYGON geometry, the projection is still NAD83, and there are 55 features (the non-NYC PUMAS were filtered out during the join, leaving us just with NYC data). Right click on Geometry again, choose the option to Recover Geometry. Specify the geometry type and the SRID, run, refresh the database, and success. A little globe appears next to pumas_nyc_subcom, indicating that it’s now a feature class.

At this point we can fire up QGIS. In the toolbar for versions post 1.02, there should be a connect to SpatialLite button. Hit connect, add a New database, and browse to get to it. Once it’s loaded, then we can hit connect to connect to it, and we’ll be able to see all feature classes (but NOT data tables, which is why we had to go through the join). Select pumas_nyc_subcom, which has features and data, and click add.

As with any GIS, now we have to symbolize the features to map the subway commuters. Right click on the layer in the table of contents, select properties, and you’ll get to the recently redesigned properties menu. Go to Symbology, map the subway commuters field by graduated values, change some colors, and voila, a map!

The developers are still experimenting with improvements – there’s a button in the upper right-hand corner of the symbology tab that asks you if you want to try the New Symbology – this is a new layout, with the introduction of graduated color palettes. It’s pretty slick, but still a work in progress (color ranges are assigned from dark to light, with the lowest values getting the darkest color; the opposite of cartographic convention). The same label properties are there too, but you can experiment with the improved labeling engine under the Plugins menu. The automatic placement of labels is vastly improved.

Mapping totals for subway commuters isn’t as interesting as mapping the percentage of commuters in each PUMA who ride the subway. So I’ll share my experiments working with calculated fields (in SpatialLite and QGIS) in my next post.

• There is a project called Sextante, which is essentially an open source ArcToolbox for gvSIG. It adds a lot of geoprocessing and analysis functions and is pretty easy to install. There are 200 + tools in the box, but for some reason not all of them are active. I’m not sure why this is the case, but haven’t poked around much to find out.

• There are also a number of extra plugins for QGIS that are available through the QGIS wiki under PluginRepository; they include plugins that add more symbolization and that make table joins possible. Haven’t had a chance to try this yet either, but it sounds like these extras could make QGIS a lot more viable as a thematic mapping option.

• I found out about the QGIS plugins from this article, which offers a good overview of QGIS. The article also discusses one of the other shortcomings of open source GIS – the lack of a support for a simple, desktop geodatabase similar to the Microsoft Access personal geodatabases. PostGIS is certainly powerful and there has been a lot written about it, but a server based geodatabase is not always the best solution, particularly for small, stand-alone projects. There is a cool project called Spatiallite, where someone has created geographically enabled SQLite databases (which are small, stand alone dbs). You can export shapefiles to them, or simply view and edit the attributes in a shapefile via a virtual connection. Based on what I’ve looked at thus far, you can access SQlite databases directly in GRASS and when using GRASS datasets via QGIS, but I haven’t been able to connect to a SQlite db with the other software I’ve looked at – it’s just not supported yet.

• In researching open source GIS, I’ve looked at a book specifically on GRASS, Open Source GIS: A Grass Approach, as well as two books on web mapping (GIS for Web Developers: Adding ‘Where’ to Your Web Applications and Web Mapping Illustrated: Using Open Source GIS Toolkits)which cover GDAL and OGR, QGIS, GIS servers, PostGIS and PostgreSQL, and a few other tools. There is a book that’s recently been published that focusses specifically on Open Source Desktop GIS – Desktop GIS: Mapping the Planet with Open Source Tools. I pre-ordered a copy on Amazon that was supposed to ship in Mid September, but is now being delayed until late October. Based on the table of contents it looks pretty thorough and covers many of the choices I listed in my previous post, and I’m looking forward to its arrival.