Country Distances

A simple script for computing distances between countries. This queries Geonames to get a list of the most populous city in each country. Then it uses the geopy library to compute the Vincenty distance between each city.

For our puposes the most populous city was a reasonable proxy for the "location" of a country. Another reasonable approach would be to use the geopgraphic centroid, but we didn't do that.

Installation

This uses Python 2.7, so you need to install a few libraries first:

pip install requests
pip install geopy
pip install iso3166

Next copy settings.cfg.template to settings.cfg and put your Geonames username in there. You need a username to use their API, and uou can sign up for one for free (don't forget to enable API access on your preference page)

Running

Simply run:

python get-biggest-cities.py

and it will generate a distances.csv file with the results. These are keyed by each country's iso3166-alpha3 code. The results are in Kilometers.