GeometricFeatures

The GeometricFeatures class knows about both a local cache of Geometric Data and the GitHub repository where it can be retrieved as needed. A GeometricFeatures object is created with an optional path to the local cache and/or the name of the remote branch or tag in which to find the geometric data. The default local cache is ./geometric_data, and the default remote branch is the same as the version number of the geometric_features package that is installed (highly recommended!). If using a branch other than the package version, the list of all available features and tags (which is included in the package) may not include all the features in the desired branch. That is, if you install v0.1 of the geometric_features conda package, you should expect to work with v0.1 of the Geometric Data as well.

An example workflow for creating a GeometricFeatures object and using it to read in a set of geometric features (possibly after downloading the geometric data from GitHub) is:

from geometric_features import GeometricFeatures

# get geometric data from geometric_features v0.1 and store it in
# the local directory ./geometric_data
gf = GeometricFeatures(localCache='./geometric_data',
                       remoteBranchOrTag='0.1')

# read in a feature collection defining the coastline
fc = gf.read(componentName='natural_earth', objectType='region',
             featureNames=['Land Coverage'])