Overview

Teaching: 15 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

• How do I create a map I can interact with using Python?

• What packages are available for this?

Objectives

• Use folium to create a simple slippy map with geopandas data.

• See other packages in use for this purpose.

Interactive Maps

Static maps, like the sort you’d develop for a publication or brochure, are worthwhile for their durability, flexibility, and relative ease in creation. However, in a time where the creation of public-facing research products is demanded by an increasing range of domains (& funding sources), being able to create interactive, web-based displays of geospatial data is critical.

There are myriad ways to approach this challenge. Hard-core web developers can roll their own websites from scratch in Javascript, HTML, and CSS, leveraging their own data APIs and maintaining their own cyberinfrastructure. Hard-core domain researchers can simply put some easy-to-read plots on a simple website and call it a day. Somewhere in between lies the ability to take an already-polished data analysis pipeline in Python and output the geospatial results to a web-friendly map ready to be hosted on a simple static hosting solution (like your departmental web server or Amazon S3).

That’s the intent of the Python package folium: to combine data objects in Python with a web mapping framework known as Leaflet to produce interactive geospatial data products on the web.

Note: at this point, there are several packages which claim to accomplish what Folium does. Packages like mapbox-gl-jupyter and Holoviews/Geoviews can accomplish much of Folium’s core functionality, but have strengths and weaknesses of their own. Folium is a great way to learn these frameworks, but if you have a specific plotting need, know that there are several very powerful options out there which may better suit your needs.

This tutorial lives in its entirety here, in a notebook called foliumTutorial.

Key Points

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