Vincent Picavet
Vincent Picavet is an engineer in applied mathematics. After a few years working on satellite imagery, he dedicates himself to GIS, designing and implementing spatial data infrastructures with PostGIS and PostgreSQL as main components. Vincent is a PostGIS contributor and has given a lot of training sessions at the university or for private companies. He regularly talks at international conferences, PGConf.eu, FOSS4G or other events related to GIS and spatial data. He founded Oslandia in 2009, providing services in opensource GIS.
Sessions
"Géocommun" [ʒeokɔmɛ̃] : is it the latest buzzword in France or a large movement towards more openness in the geospatial realm ?
The French National Geographical Institute (IGNF) recently started communicating its vision towards the development of Geo-commons. This sounds like a strategical change in the way the institute apprehends geo-data and geo-software production.
In this presentation, we first try to give a definition of what a "geocommon" is. Then we review the initiatives currently being deployed by various actors in France to transform this word into a reality.
We study the roots of these actions and their links to opendata, opensource and opengov movements.
We also try to provide a mindmap of involved actors, and how they interact together : administrations, data-oriented communities or software-oriented communities.
Then we anticipate the impact on free and opensource software for geomatics, and how it could affect technologies and communities in this area.
PostgreSQL is the most advanced opensource RDBMS. As GIS folks, you most probably use it in combination with PostGIS, its Geospatial plugin.
When dealing with Geospatial data, we usually focus on geometries. But most of feature attributes are text data. Of course, filtering on these text data with standard SQL capabilities is a day-to-day operation for database users.
But PostgreSQL provides much more capabilities when it comes down to text data management. In this presentation, we will go through a few of them.
After a quick look at standard text functions in PostgreSQL, we will discover the lesser known fuzzy matching modules :
- pg_trgm extension allows for string searches using trigraphs to determine a similarity rank between text items
- fuzzystrmatch extension provides fuzzy matching functions like soundex, Levenshtein, metaphone
Then, we will explore Full Text Search ( FTS ) PostgreSQL capabilities.
Last but not least, we will peek inside PostgreSQL collation concept, which has nothing to do with your lunch. Collations are a powerful feature in PostgreSQL allowing to adapt the way you deal with text data according to the localization. Like trying to answer this - apparently - obvious question : is '12' before or after '2' ?
And, because we can, display all of this on a map :-)