ARC Shapefiles (widely used for all kinds of geo data, including US Census TIGER tm files) are reasonably easy to manipulate, and this projects means to collect and develop Python modules to read, modify and create ARC Shapefiles (and, eventually, modules to perform other related tasks). Not to be confused with project geopy, which is about Python access to geocoding.

The gepy project so far contains pure Python modules for tasks such as: reading ESRI shapefiles, writing PNG image files, and computing tile geometries (for overlays on Google Maps and other map services).