About the Cover Illustration

The figure on the cover of PostGIS in Action is captioned “A woman from Ubli, Croatia.” The illustration is taken from a reproduction of an album of Croatian traditional costumes from the mid-nineteenth century by Nikola Arsenovic, published by the Ethnographic Museum in Split, Croatia, in 2003. The illustrations were obtained from a helpful librarian at the Ethnographic Museum in Split, itself situated in the Roman core of the medieval center of the town: the ruins of Emperor Diocletian’s retirement palace from around AD 304. The book includes finely colored illustrations of figures from different regions of Croatia, accompanied by descriptions of the costumes and of everyday life.

Ubli is the main ferry port on the island of Lastovo, located in an archipelago of islets in the Adriatic Sea off the coast of Croatia. The main characteristic of an Ubli woman’s costume is the rich and colorful embroidery. Over a white linen dress that is trimmed with red bands, women typically wear a long blue vest decorated with red woolen roses as well as an embroidered apron. Colorful woolen socks and a little red hat decorated on the edges complete the costume. Live flowers are often added to the back of the hat.

Dress codes and lifestyles have changed over the last 200 years, and the diversity by region, so rich at the time, has faded away. It is now hard to tell apart the inhabitants of different continents, let alone of different hamlets or towns separated by only a few miles. Perhaps we have traded cultural diversity for a more varied personal life—cer-tainly for a more varied and fast-paced technological life.