About the Authors

Paolo Corti is based in Rome, Italy. He is an environmental engineer with more than 15 years of experience in the GIS sector. After working with proprietary solutions for some years, he has proudly switched to open-source technologies and Python for almost a decade.

He has been working as a developer and analyst for organizations such as the EU Joint Research Center, UN World Food Program, and the Italian Government.

Currently, he is working within the GeoNode project, for which he is a core developer, in the context of emergency preparedness and response.

He is an OSGeo Charter member and writes a blog on open-source GIS at http://www.paolocorti.net/.

I would like to thank the PostGIS Steering Committee and everyone else who makes PostGIS such a beautiful project.

A special thanks must go to the co-authors of this book: they have been brilliant mates always ready to give me suggestions and help.

A mention is needed here to some geospatial minds that are great source of inspiration for me: Paul Ramsey, Sandro Santilli, Frank Warmerdam,and Even Rouault.

Last, but not least, I would like to thank my wife Renata and my family for their support and patience.

Thomas J Kraft is currently a Planning Technician at Cleveland Metroparks after beginning as a GIS intern in 2011.

He graduated with Honors from Cleveland State University in 2012, majoring in Environmental Science with an emphasis on GIS.

When not in front of a computer, he enjoys his weekends landscaping and the outdoors in general.

I'd like to thank the co-authors of this book, who are some of the most knowledgeable and motivated professionals in the field. It's truly an honor 
to have been involved in this process.

I'd like to give special acknowledgements to Stephen Mather (also a 
co-author) for introducing me to the world of open-source GIS and my girlfriend, Sandy, for keeping me on the straight and narrow.

Stephen Vincent Mather has worked in the geospatial industry for 15 years, having always had a flair for geospatial analyses in general, especially those at the intersection of Geography and Ecology. His work in open-source geospatial databases started 5 years ago with PostGIS and he immediately began using PostGIS as an analytic tool, attempting a range of innovative and sometimes bleeding-edge techniques (although he admittedly prefers the cutting edge). His geospatial career has spanned a variety of interesting and novel natural-resource projects, everything from the movement of ice sheets in Antarctica to hiking viewsheds and mobile trail applications to help park users find trails, picnic areas, and restrooms.

Stephen is currently the GIS manager for Cleveland Metroparks in Cleveland, Ohio. He manages a small geospatial shop that specializes in high-end cartography, curating and generating data, geospatial web development, and analyses for natural-resource management, largely with open-source software.

Stephen is also a Mennonite technologist, aka a straw-hat hacker, interested in creating fair and open data and infrastructure for better governance and humanitarian purposes. He is heavily involved in the Cleveland Civic Hacking movement as he works with the public to help them get engaged with geospatial data. In his spare time, he builds guitars really, really slowly.

Thanks go out to those who form my geospatial pedigree: Gordon Longsworth (and his advisor Ian Mcharg), Kevin Czajkowski, Karl Schneider, and Ken Jezek, as well as to the geospatial minds who inspire me, including Martin Davis.

A special thanks goes to the blessings that are my two beautiful and bright children and my wife (who is equally so), all of whom exhibit endless patience and love. They are three people who both structure my life and fill its interstitial spaces with the glow of their love.

Bborie Park has been breaking (and subsequently fixing) computers for most of his life. His primary interests involves developing end-to-end pipelines for spatial datasets. He is an active contributor to the PostGIS project and is a member of the PostGIS Steering Committee. He happily resides with his wife Nicole in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I would like to thank my wife Nicole, who patiently tolerated many hours, days, and weeks of my working when I should have been relaxing. I would also like to thank the PostGIS community and Steering Committee for accepting and providing feedback for my contributions to the project.