Portraits of Ireland Ltd is a web based Irish company aiming to help connect the diaspora to people and places in Ireland through Art. This startup company required an online interactive atlas to assist both artists and those commissioning their work to find not only the island's more well known locations but also its remote and smaller place locations. To this end an Artist Atlas was created. Some of the primary requirements were a cartographically rich, atheistically pleasing vector based system, fully searchable, and with as extensive a database as possible.(2005-09-18)

The presentation will discuss the loading and indexing of spatial data, but will concentrate on the spatial functions available for further analysis in MySQL. Specific business cases will be used to illustrate these functions, such as the real-time monitoring of boats in offshore windfarm construction. A Java front-end will be used to support the claim that Java plus Mysql equals traditional GIS