Python Latitude and Longitude Coordinates Console App.

Recently I have been working on an OSINT investigation and I found myself recording and plotting a lot of latitude and longitude coordinates. The purpose was to visualise a suspect's life, where they might live, work, be in hiding and visualise links between each of these categories. As always a task can become onerous when one has to repeat the same action more than 2 or three times. Where possible I always try to find the most productive, quickest or easiest method to process tasks. That then prompted me to research, experiment and build a simple Python based console app that an OSINT Researcher or Intelligence Analyst can use to make this process as easier. The app offers the following functionality:

1. Plot a single latitude and longitude location.

2. Plot two or more locations and create a .html map file. (I recommend no more than 3 to 4)

3. Plot locations from an Excel file and create a .html map file.

4. Calculate the distance between two latitude and longitude locations.

5. Create a radius around one latitude and longitude plot and create a .html map file.

6. Draw a line between two latitude and longitude locations and create a .html map file.

The app took around 4 days to build on and off, taking around 24 man hours. I had to research working with GPS coordinates in Python and drawing data from an Excel file. Credits are attributed at the bottom for the tutorials I used.

Some issues arouse when working with Excel ensuring that the code and the sheet name were the same, please be careful the code will specify 'sheet1' you may have renamed the sheet that contains your data as something else. One simple update to the app that really elevates its simplicity and functionality was learning to process the copied and pasted GPS coordinates in a For loop, which stripped them, converted them to float and attributed them to separate variables. It is possible to take separate values as float inputs, but it is less effective, takes longer, is less UX friendly and mistakes can be made. Due to my lack of coding proficiency I also had some issues with option two where the user can specify how many sets of latitude and longitude coordinates they can enter and plot. I understood the concept of a While loop. However I had to deduce the best way to use the logic to operate the loop as intended. I also had to experiment quite a lot with the code location, before I could get the While loop to function as intended. One needs to work out carefully what code needs to be repeated by the loop and what does not and then placing the code snippets in their correction locations.

Some screen shots of the app are as follows:

Credits:

Dav Wheat | UK Train Stations Data Set | GitHub - davwheat/uk-railway-stations: A dataset containing information about all UK railway stations. · GitHub Geeks for Geeks | Working with GPS Coordinates in Python | Python | Plotting Google Map using gmplot package - GeeksforGeeks

Geeks for Geeks | Working with Excel and Python | Reading an excel file using Python - GeeksforGeeks