A Gentle Introduction to GIS

Datums! Coordinate systems! Map projections! Topologies! Spatial applications are a nebulous, daunting concept to most Pythonistas. This talk is a gentle introduction into the concepts, terminology and tools to demystify the world of the world.

This talk will have multiple parts:

• What is GIS?
• Cartography
• Analysis
• Geodatabases
• Types of data
• Vector
• Raster
• How do you talk about spots on earth?
• What is a datum and why does it matter?
• Spatial reference systems: WUT?
• Map projections: what's appropriate and what's web mercator
• Great circle distances and geodesy (or, your lines are wrong and you should feel bad)
• Analysis
• Overlay operators
• Clementini operators
• Buffer, clip their friends
• Will demonstrate concepts with commercial tools (the ArcGIS stack) and some open source (GDAL, OGR, QGIS).