Meeting Start Time: Tue, 04 Apr 2006 18:45:00 -0700

As you can see from March's meeting announcement, Aaron was originally scheduled for that meeting but was unable to attend at the last moment.  Boice filled in and gave an excellent intro to the open source PHP tools available for GIS work and how you could use those tools to quickly build highly capable maps.  I've spoken to Aaron and he will be able to give his presentation for the April 4th meeting.  In that meeting, Aaron will expand on what Boice presented.  Covering a few more tools and diving deeper into their uses.

Slides from meeting [~1.9MB pdf]

GIS (geographic information systems), has gained quite a bit of press lately, especially in the Web arena (i.e Google Maps & PortlandMaps).  Lucky for us, PHP is quite extensively used and there are many open source tools becoming available.  Aaron Racicot of Portland's own, Ecotrust will be giving a presentation of the following plus a bit of what Ecotrust is doing with GIS.

• Brief into to GIS as a concept with usage examples
• How Open Source GIS fits into the picture (workflows)
• Web-based GIS and how PHP is heavily used
• Look at code and maybe even make a quick little example map and build it up in real time

If you want to find out what all this GIS buzz is about or are looking for advise on how to solve an issue you are curently having with GIS, this is the meeting for you.

As always, meetings are free and open to all and the meeting will continue after 8pm at a near by pub.

Here are some links to some of the tools that will be discussed and also some sites that demo GIS technology:

General Open Source GIS::
-Maptools
Web-Based GIS::
* Custom Tools
- Mapserver
- PostGIS
- GDAL/OGR
*Pre-canned solutions
- Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, etc.

Desktop GIS::
- QGis
- GRASS

Desktop Viewers::
- Google Earth
- NASA WorldWind

Demo Sites::
- Mapserver (using AJAX)
- Cartoweb
- SeaCOOS

PHP Specific::
- PHP specific discussion will be around PHP_Mapscript for Mapserver
- PHP for database interaction