Tutorial: A Spatial Wiki from the Ground-Up

Wiki and Spatial tools make a powerful combination for building and maintaining location based knowledge. The workshop will present a complete exercise, building a Spatial Wiki from the ground-up hosted on an Amazon EC2 instance using 100% free and open source tools including Ubuntu, MediaWiki, Apache, GeoServer, OpenLayers, and PostGIS. Articles in the Wiki will be spatially enabled, and discoverable via the Wiki's built-in search capabilities, or a click-able map index. Spatial reference(s) will be maintained in a back-end spatial database and updated dynamically via markup in the article itself. GeoServer will be used to serve the spatial data and presented in the Wiki articles using OpenLayers with background data from OpenStreetMap, Google Maps, Bing, or similar. Relevant MediaWiki extensions, server-side scripts and other "enablers" will be made available as part of the workshop, but will not be covered in detail. Attendees can expect to depart the course with their own fully operational Spatial Wiki along with a basic knowledge of a variety of excellent free and open source tools.

Requirements

• A computer capable of remotely administering an Amazon EC2 instance via ssh or similar (Linux and Mac PCs are fine, or a Windows PC with PuTTY or equivalent).
• A valid Amazon AWS account to create an EC2 instance to be used in the class.
• A rudimentary knowledge of Linux administration and tools like vi is desirable but not absolutely required.