It was suggested by a CLUG member ...
All are welcome. Admission is free.
HOWEVER YOU MUST RSVP to off...@cuug.ab.ca so we have enough snacks.
Please visit www.cuug.ab.ca
City Mapping with Free Software Solutions
Roy Brander is giving a talk on City Mapping with Free Software Solutions.
Anyone that knows Roy will tell you what an entertaining and informative
speaker he is.
Regards,
Chris Aziz
CUUG President
from: http://www.cuug.ab.ca/
City Mapping with Free Software Solutions
April General Meeting
City Mapping with Free Software Solutions
Speaker: Roy Brander, Senior Infrastructure Engineer for Water Resources, The
City of Calgary
Geographic Information Systems -- software that combines the graphics of CAD
with the textual information of databases,
allowing programmable map displays that highlight the geographic location of
data -- are now a familiar sight everywhere
from Google mobile maps to newspaper displays of electoral results. What took a
whole mainframe for the simplest maps in
the 1960s was a $20,000 Unix workstation when the modern GIS on a single
workstation became possible around 1990. For
over 20 years, the commercial field has been utterly dominated by the products
of one company, ESRI, and GIS was
understood to require not just a powerful PC, but a major back-end database,
usually Oracle, on a powerful server. Since
it was a high-end hardware problem, the software costs were also many thousands
and there was very little GIS done
personally. Educational institutions taught with ESRI products almost
exclusively.
In just the last few years, long projects by advocates of the open-source
databases came to fruition with powerful,
robust geodatabase add-ons for PostgreSQL and MySQL. The add-on for
PostgreSQL, called PostGIS, is by far the most
popular and supported. The most recent version of PostGIS, 2.0, just released
in 2012, makes it an extremely clear and
simple matter to combine map linework into a database. Meanwhile, great strides
have also been made with open-source
mapping client software -- the free product Quantum GIS will be demonstrated
along with PostGIS, and compared to ESRI
products costing many thousands of dollars.
Roy Brander is a CUUG Life Member. He has given a number of presentations on a
wide variety of subjects, including the
BSDWall project, the MEPIS Linux distribution, the Titanic (the ship, not the
movie), management of Calgary's water
mains, and the ASUS Eee PC and Moore's Law. At his day job, Roy is the Senior
Infrastructure Engineer for Water
Resources, The City of Calgary.
Location:
The City of Calgary - Water Centre
Bow River Room 2
625 - 25 Ave. S.E.
(25th Avenue S.E. and Spiller Road S.E.)
(link to parking information)
5:00 PM, Tuesday, April 22, 2014
Snacks at 17:00. Presentation begins at 17:30. Please note the earlier start
time for this presentation.
Free admission for the general public.
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