submitted a talk to GIS conference in Lynwood

FYI:

Robert

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URL submittion link: http://www.waurisa.org/conferences/Abstract_submissions/Abstracts_submit.php
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Presenter: Robert Bernier
email: robert7390(at)comcast(dot)net
phone: 206-407-9298
job title: PostgreSQL Business Intelligence Analyst
Agency: Medio Systems Inc./Operations Dept

Biography:
Introduced to computers in the 1960s, he programmed in FORTRAN on a mainframe with 4MB RAM. In the 80s, he helped introduce IT into his undergraduate program. In 1995, Robert took up Linux and was part of the rush leveraging the Internet, eventually focusing his open source activities on Postgres. Robert has presented at conferences, written dozens of articles, contributed to books and consulted and trained defense contractors, Fortune 100 companies, research centers and universities. Currently, he volunteers at Earth Economics, http://www.eartheconomics.org. His day job is Medio Systems specializing in big data and predictive analytics in the mobile industry.

Length of presentation: 60 minutes
User level: New, Intermediate, Advanced
Presentation Title: The Path Not Taken; A primer to PostGIS.

Abstract:
People have often thought that leveraging GIS technology implied learning how to work a menu driven, proprietary, industry standard, and often expensive, application. While the ability of rendering data into the desired graphical representation is obvious, equally important is the ability to understand alternate means of expressing GIS relations thus allowing us to ponder edge cases that would not otherwise be easily expressed, let alone resolved.

There is another way to explore and understand GIS issues: these last few years have not only seen an explosion of capacity and features on the frontend applications but backend, i.e. the database, as well.

This talk introduces you to the spatially enabled, opensource and free database, PostGIS.

The following concepts will be covered and demonstrated:
- Installation of PostgreSQL
- Enabling GIS
- Understanding the GIS functions used in PostgreSQL
- Getting results by executing SQL
- Loading shapefiles
- Examples

Working with a database can be no more difficult than using a graphically based application. However, it does require a different way of looking at your data. The only real challenge is shifting your viewpoint from one way of look at GIS to another.