Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are by their nature data driven. The data comes in a wide variety of raster and vector formats. Rasters hold raw, continuous data recorded striaght from the real world. An example is Satellite/aerial imagery, this is a commonly held in an open format with broad support, such as GeoTIFF [...]

For those who aren’t familiar, ArcSDE is server software that sits atop a database to spatially enable it. The resulting geodatabase is able to store geographic features (e.g. roads, buildings, endangered habitats) along with more common SQL data types. ArcSDE can also store georeferenced rasters such as scanned plans/maps or satellite/aerial imagery.
To load raster data [...]

At PyCon UK 2007 I gave a short talk on using Python to deal with tabular data. The slides, demos and modules for my talk are available for download.
There is material in the download that I didn’t present on the day. The talk covers extracting data from various tabular data formats. This is the first [...]