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A pluggable GeoDjango app of the Los Angeles Metro Rail system. Geography, loosely coupled.

I gave a talk in December 2010 about why I think maps should be pluggable.

• A ready-to-serve model set that contains the latest GIS data released by Metro Rail.
• Fragmented rail lines in the government’s source file have been consolidated.
• Stops along each line have been connected to stations and lines. This is not done in the government’s separate source files.
• Geometry fields are published in three of the most common SRIDs, as well as their source projection.
• Simplified geometry fields that thin down the data for display on a single map.
• A read-only admin for reviewing the data

Before you begin, you will need to have a Django project with GeoDjango’s ‘django.contrib.gis’ app installed and configured. The official installation guide is here. The official tutorial is here. Both are excellent.

You can download it from PyPi.

pip install latimes-pluggablemaps-lametrorail

Or, pull the trunk from github

git clone git://github.com/datadesk/latimes-pluggablemaps-lametrorail.git

In settings.py’s INSTALLED_APPS tuple, add the following.

'la_metro_rail',

From the shell, enter:

python manage.py syncdb

From the same shell, enter the following.

python manage.py loadlametrorail

That’s it! You now fire up the Django admin or jump in the shell to start playing with the data.