Create content on Geospatial fundamentals

[dhavide]

Assume, after closing #59 , that the following directories exist within the book directory:

02_Geospatial_fundamentals
├── 01_Coordinate_systems.md
└── 02_Geospatial_data.md
03_Geospatial_data_files/
└── 01_Geospatial_data_formats.md

(To be clear, the files would likely not exist yet; this specific issue is about creating the content for the three MarkDown files listed above).

• The files 02_Geospatial_fundamentals/02_Geospatial_data.md and 03_Geospatial_data_files/01_Geospatial_data_formats.md can be started by refactoring the contents of the file book/geographic_data_formats.md as it was after closing geographic data format md (issue #32) #47 .

  • The explanation of what vector & raster data are can go into the file 02_Geospatial_fundamentals/02_Geospatial_data.py. Ideally, this would have lots of pictures as illustrative examples without making explicit reference to any specific file formats or data representations.
  • The contents of the second file, 03_Geospatial_data_files/01_Geospatial_data_formats.md , would be descriptions of the various file formats. This could include very small examples of data files (e.g., like in the GeoJSON example here) links to standards documents, etc. Just enough information that a relative novice can absorb as much as they honestly need to understand how to use them later in the tutorial.

• The contents of 02_Geospatial_fundamentals/01_Coordinate_systems.md has not yet been written but needs to be explained somewhere. The tutorial user needs to know enough about spatial coordinate systems and projections that they can manipulate relevant data structures in the tutorial (e.g., crs extracted from GeoTIFF files). The documentation for QGIS has a good summary from which we can possibly draw the essential ideas.

Use as many images as possible (because they can be adapted into slides easily), bearing in mind to keep track of provenance for copyright issues.

[dhavide]

@marielaraj, please note that I've updated the default format to be .py rather than .md. It doesn't matter which we use as the default format internally (because jupytext can convert .ipynb to & from both formats).

[dhavide]

marielaraj, please disregard the above, i.e., work in Markdown (md) files rather than Python (py) files. Sigh.

On reflection, given that most of the work we're doing is about producing formatted text narrative rather than code, it makes more sense to stick to Markdown as the canonical format for work in the repository. So, let's stick with that.