Incorporating geospatial queries

[annahaensch]

Originally raised by @maminian on 9 Feb. 2022

Given a region defined in some way (person doing this would need to figure this out), can we search the records for all results which happened within that region?

Ex: "find all cases within 3 blocks of this intersection"
Ex: "find all cases within 3 blocks of the Williams College campus"
Ex: "Find all cases within this arbitrary polygon defined by longitude/latitude coordinates"

Things worth looking in to:

• geopandas package; may have some tools for this. numpy may be able to do similar things.
• Massachusetts geospatial data (personally I would search for .gov websites with .shp files ("shapefiles") but some people may prefer finding another python package for this)
• Other geospatial/address databases or python packages might be necessary (can we automatically find the boundaries of Williams College for example?)

[maminian]

I'm starting this on the branch "geospatial"... for now just made a reference map of williamstown from the existing ./data/maps/ folder.