Back to proposals-2013

Title: Location, location, location
Proposer: gavin_heavyside
Type: Tutorial
Duration: 90 minutes
Description: Geospatial information is everywhere - nearly every smartphone has a GPS chip in it, and your IP address gives clues to your physical location to every web site you visit. Between smartphones and sat-navs, most of us now have devices that are recording our location and using online services that use that location.

From finding the nearest pub in a smartphone app to analysing the spatial relationships of billions of GPS tracks, there are lots of tools, many free and open source, that can help you make sense of geospatial data quickly and easily. It has never been easier to integrate sophisticated location-based analysis into your application or business.

In this session we will learn about the key concepts behind geospatial data and analysis, including GPS, coordinate systems, projections, and different types of spatial relationships. We will discover the features of open source geospatial databases that let you query 2D and 3D data using SQL, GIS tools, and some of the online APIs that let you to add mapping, geocoding and more to your application.

To finish off, I'll show you how to build a web service that finds the nearest UK postcode to any latitude and longitude, performing spatial SQL queries using an open source database and data freely downloadable from the Ordnance Survey OpenData project.

Roger: Yes (nice little niche presentation)
Ewan: Probably, yes. I seem to have missed all Gavin's previous talks, but he's presented regularly, I think? Good subject, so if his previous feedback is good, then thumbs up