Introduction to an Open Source Geostack

Introduction to an Open Source Geostack

You have seen all those cool mapping applications, both on the desktop and on the web, and want to make some of your own nifty mapping applications. This workshop will give you all the tools you need to build a complete GIS and web mapping stack using a selection of free and open source tools.

We will take shapefiles and put them in PostGIS. With this as the base we will use open source GIS desktop tools (QGIS), GeoServer, GeoWebCache, Google Earth and OpenLayers.

Getting Started

  • This workshop uses a software/data bundle
  • Download the bundle and unzip it in a convenient location.

Workshop Materials

Inside the workshop bundle, you will find:

workshop/
a directory containing this HTML workshop
software/
a directory containing all the software we will be installing and a couple extras
data/
a directory containing the shape files we will be loading

All the data in the package is public domain and freely re-distributable. All the software in the package is open source, and freely re-distributable. This workshop is licensed as Creative Commons share alike with attribution, and is freely re-distributable under the terms of that license.

Workshop Modules

Introduction
What is a “geostack” and why do you want one?
Open Source Software
How to recognize open source, how open source is changing the way software is built, bought and sold.
Installing PostGIS and GeoServer
Installing our chosen spatial database, PostGIS, and our application server, GeoServer.
PostGIS
Loading data into the PostGIS spatial database, querying it, and managing the database.
Installing QGIS
Installing desktop GIS software, QGIS.
QGIS
View the data in the PostGIS database, edit the shapes and attributes, print output.
GeoServer
Set-up a web mapping engine, configure and style a layer.
OpenLayers
Create a web page viewing and editing the data we have loaded into the database and configured in the web mapping engine.
GeoWebCache
Add content acceleration for the web page.
Conclusions
What should you take away from this workshop?

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About OpenGeo

OpenGeo provides commercial open source software for internet mapping and geospatial application development. We are a social enterprise dedicated to the growth and support of open source software.

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Feel free to use this material, but we ask that you please retain the OpenGeo branding, logos and style.