For years we have used ArcGIS’ Network Analyst to compute network distances and route-based service areas. In the past we found open source options to be lacking. We experimented, for example, with pgRouting in 2014 and our rough assessment was that it did not provide an adequate alternative. Details are in our blog post on […]
Continue reading →gdalAlthough we still use ESRI products such as ArcGIS for geographic analysis, more and more we find ourselves turning to open source software like PostGIS and QGIS. In many cases, though, even PostGIS and QGIS are more software than necessary for a given task and we prefer to skip the ‘middleman’ in favor of the […]
Continue reading →The Python library BeautifulSoup is an incredible tool for pulling out information from a webpage. You can use it not only to extract tables and lists but you can also use to to pull out very specific elements like a paragraph with a green font color. To briefly illustrate this functionality and in honor of […]
Continue reading →Although many data science-related projects can be completed with a single software tool we often find that decisions about what tool to use for a project involve weighing a combination of what tool would be “best” for the job, what tools we're most familiar with and whether we already have scripts we can use. As […]
Continue reading →It is not uncommon for us to need to extract text from a PDF. For small PDFs with minimal data or text it's fairly straightforward to extract the data manually by using 'save as' or simply copying and pasting the data you need. For a recent project, however, we were asked to extract detailed address […]
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