Since you were a kid at school you have been exposed to a lot of maps. Maps of countries, where you spent hours memorizing the boundaries, rivers, and capitals; historical maps, with the rise and fall of ancient empires, where you dreamed of being a great conqueror; economics maps, with the locations and amounts of goods and services. Every day on newspapers, on TV, or in a far more accurate presentation, in books and academic papers you look at data represented on a map. Maps are a spatial representation of data and are often the main output of a GIS.

GIS is an acronym for Geographical Information System. Does it sounds too complicated to you? Don't be afraid; it is not so different from many other systems for managing information you probably already know. The main difference is in the spatial piece of information. All the data contained in a GIS has a spatial dimension or a link to another object with spatial attributes.

So what is GIS? In a nutshell, we can define it as a system to acquire and store data, to process data, and to produce data representations, that is, maps. In this book you will learn that working with GeoServer requires you to prepare your data, process it to render in a beautiful map, and build up a set of functions that enable a user to interact with your data. So building up a GeoServer instance may be described as GIS-building.

A detailed comprehension of GIS is far beyond the scope of this book and it is not required for starting with GeoServer. But you need to have some basic skills in spatial data, maps, and spatial reference systems.

Let's go; we are going to turn you into a neo-cartographer!