Let's Talk About Your Geostack Workshop

Let's Talk About Your Geostack
Eric Theise

Oct 18th, 1-5pm
Harvard, CGIS Knafel (North),Room K050 (http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fims.fas.harvard.edu%2Fclassrooms%2Froom.php%3Frm%3Drm0295&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNGoPIjTpjxY4zMz0I7PHVpfMM2Zrw)

This four-hour workshop is designed for developers, cartographers, and data visualizers who wish to set up an open source geospatial software stack on their own laptop. The target audience is advanced beginners.

We'll begin by talking about the stack components and how they fit together. We'll import data from an OpenStreetMap extract of Boston into a PostgreSQL database, wire TileMill up to use that data, then
create & serve simply-styled tiles. Next, we'll create a trivial Node/Express web server to return selected point of interest data from our PostgreSQL database in GeoJSON format, and use Leaflet to layer it over the tiles created earlier. We'll talk about the use of GeoJSON properties to affect display characteristics such as color,opacity,
and whether to display particular entities, and sketch out some exercises to try on your own.

Plan to devote a few hours in advance of the workshop to installing software and downloading data. Instructions can be found in the slides leading up to "Let's Bake Some Tiles!" at http://erictheise.github.io/geostack-deck/

We'll be using Mapzen's Boston metro extract, so also download https://s3.amazonaws.com/metro-extracts.mapzen.com/boston_massachusetts.osm.pbf