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/.

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.

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.

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.