A good friend and ex-colleague of mine, Shoaib Burq, will be running an afternoon tutorial on the 17th September at RailsConf Europe called Rails GIS Hacks.

Since the advent of Google Maps and a number of other free web APIs for mapping, there has been an exponential increase in the number of mapshups and geography-related web sites. In this tutorial we will introduce what’s happening in the Ruby/Rails Geographic Information space. We will go from defining the key concepts behind the geospatial technology to developing a full-blown mapping application in Rails. In the process, we will make use of a number of cool Rails plug-ins that will let us integrate external geographic data sources as well us share our own data. […]

Sounds like fun.. 🙂