Geospatial search frameworks for Python

In this talk, some open source frameworks would be discussed and demonstrated for use with Python projects for tackling spatial search related problems. The applications of spatial search could involve social networking, log analysis, realtime event discovery, etc.

Some of the prominent open source frameworks to be discussed include PostGIS, Lucene (Spatial), MongoDB etc. The idea is to walk Python developers through handson examples for all the spatial search frameworks available, and very high level discussion of pros and cons of each for specific likely scenarios.

1. Need for spatial search for Python applications
2. Brief high level description of the internal algorithms
3. Demo of a small app using Lucene/Solr for spatial search
4. Demo of a small app using PostGIS
5. Demo of a small app using MongoDB
6. Comparison of the frameworks

With very high level demonstrations for all the frameworks, the whole length of the talk might, more realistically, be around 15-20 minutes.

Ishan Chattopadhyaya is a Software Engineer at AOL India, working for Mapquest in the search team. He is responsible for Mapquest's new one-box search interface which is now live at http://new.mapquest.com.

Apart from that, Ishan is an ex-GSoC student (2009) for the GNOME project. He is responsible for integration of Python into GNOME's IDE, Anjuta (http://blogs.gnome.org/anjuta/2010/08/05/anjuta-gains-support-for-python/). Besides, Ishan has been involved with some other Python projects of varying sizes.