Tupu is a Python project centered around efficiently computing geodesic distances between points or lists. Features include:
- Distances to a given point (e.g. distances from each point in a list to NYC)
- Nearest neighbors: distances to the closest point in another list (e.g. distances from each point to a city), and the identity of such point
- Number of neighbors: number of points of another list within a certain distance or buffer.
Its main goals are to be fast and simple to use. However, the project is mostly personal, so although issues and pull requests are welcome, I won't work on feature requests.
After cloning the repo and opening the panflute folder:
python setup.py install
: installs the package locally
python setup.py develop
: installs locally with a symlink so changes are automatically updated
From Python:
import tupu
# TODO...
From the command line:
tupu some_cities.csv?id=uid --output=augmented.tsv --distance=dist_ny,40.7143,-74.0060
(See also [examples/README.md])
rtree
(wrapper aroundlibspatialindex
). Windows binaries herepyproj
(wrapper aroundproj4
)
Tupu was one of the Inca measures of distance, equivalent to about 130 cm. I would have preferred to use "topo", but it's already a quite popular name on Github, and has other meanings.
Jerry D. Moore, "Incidence of Travel: Recent Journeys in Ancient South America", p.208
Earlier tests deemed them too slow/complicated, but there might be workarounds. EG:
- Not parallelized, although that should be trivial
- Not Cython, although most of the heavy load is already in C.
- Only deals with points, not with lines/polygons
- Currently only stores distance to closest city (although allowing more is trivial)
- Currently does not compute number of points within a given distance (although allowing more is trivial)