February Meetup: Styling, Scaling, and Analyzing Big GeoData

This month's GeoDC meetup will feature a variety of lightning talks on topics like geo's role in big data, the new language for styling maps CartoCSS, and the latest movements in the free collaborative map of the world OpenStreetMap. If you're interested in cartography, GIS, geodata, and all things geospatial, come out to Geo DC for some interesting talks and to meet others working in and passionate about the space.

So far we have two talks on the lineup:

Geo doesn't come up much in discussions of big data, but scaling geospatial data management and analysis is an interesting challenge. Robin Kraft (https://twitter.com/robinkraft) will talk about this in the context of building FORMA, a deforestation alerting tool that uses Hadoop for data processing and CartoDB for visualization. Tom MacWright (https://twitter.com/tmcw) will talk about CartoCSS (http://mapbox.com/tilemill/docs/manual/carto/), a language for styling maps that's at the heart of MapBox, Vizzuality, and soon OpenStreetMap's systems. Lee De Cola will show how the R language manages, analyzes, and visualizes point, raster and polygon data. The R environment integrates statistical and spatial functionality, allowing the user to focus on patterns rather than cartographic details.
CLAVIN (http://clavin.bericotechnologies.com/) is an open source software library for extracting and resolving geographic entities from unstructured text. Charlie Greenbacker (https://twitter.com/greenbacker), creator of the CLAVIN geoparser, will talk about how it works and how it enables geospatial analytics on big data. If you want to give a lightning talk, message us through meetup or on Twitter at @Geo_DC (http://twitter.com/geo_dc).
Geo DC meets the first Wednesday of every month at Stetson's. This is a 21 and over venue. If you are underage and want to attend, please reach out ahead of time and we'll do our best to get you in.

For updates on Geo DC meetups and announcements from members, join our meetup group (http://www.meetup.com/geo-dc), follow @Geo_DC (https://twitter.com/geo_dc) on Twitter, and join our Google group (https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/geonerds-dc).