Mark was unwittingly flung into the deep end of open source geospatial software straight out of uni and has never looked back. With broad experience integrating proprietary and open source products into customer infrastructures, he has developed and extended software across the geospatial software stack including UMN MapServer, PostGIS, uDig, GeoServer and GeoTools. Mark’s many travels have led him to Sydney where he is now a geospatial software architect for LISAsoft.
Mike has a love of maps stretching back to childhood and has spent over a decade in the fields of support and training. In his current vocation as Outreach Engineer for OpenGeo, he is the curator of the GeoServer Blog, the lead documentation writer for GeoServer, and the maintainer of the GeoServer Windows installer. Mike considers himself an advocate on behalf of users of software and is reviving the lost art of quality documentation. He is currently developing training classes for building and maintaining an open source geospatial stack.
Paul is a geospatial consultant with OpenGeo, an expert in open source software and a founder of the PostGIS open source spatial database project. Paul is a director of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation and has been a long time advocate for making intelligent use of open source in systems design. Paul speaks and teaches frequently at conferences on the use and abuse of open source geospatial software and is a keynote speaker at this years conference.
These sections conform to a number of conventions to make it easier to follow the conversation. This section gives a brief overview of what to expect in the way of typographic conventions, as well as a short overview of the structure of each workbook.
Directions for you, the workshop attendee, will be noted by bold font.
For example:
Click Next to continue.
SQL query examples will be displayed in an offset box
SELECT postgis_full_version();
These examples can be entered into the query window or command line interface.
Notes are used to provide information that is useful but not critical to the overall understanding of the topic.
Note
If you haven’t eaten an apple today, the doctor may be on the way.
Where table or column names are referred to in the text, they are be rendered in a bold font.
For example:
Select the gid column in the streets table.
File names and paths will be shown in fixed-width font.
For example:
Double click on C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\bin\pgAdmin3.exe.
Sections are designed to be progressive. Each section will start with the assumption that you have completed and understood the previous section in the series and will build on that knowledge. A single section will progress through a handful of ideas and provide working examples wherever possible. At the end of a section , where appropriate, we have included a handful of exercises to allow you to try out the ideas we’ve presented. In some cases the section will include a “Things To Try” section. This section contains more complex problems than the exercises and is designed to challenge participants with advanced knowledge.