pydov: taking scientists underground

A Python package to access soil, subsoil and groundwater data

At FOSS4G-BE 2019 I presented pydov, a Python package to access data about soil, subsoil and groundwater in Flanders and integrate it into your analysis workflow.

pydov provides easy access to data from Databank Ondergrond Vlaanderen and allows describing the data as well as searching for it by location or attributes and retrieving it as a single Pandas dataframe. It is built as a reference implementation on stable metadata, WFS and XML services.

Next to a code effort, pydov is also very much a documentation project and tries to connect pro-users directly with service providers. By offering the Python package we hope to lower the bar to use our open data in research, whilst also removing the need to reimplement similar tools by the industry.

See also

— Roel