PostGIS Resources
- PostGIS Community Site
- PostGIS Issue Tracker
- PostGIS SVN Repository
- Spatial Database Tips & Tricks
- PostGIS Chat Room
OpenGeo Services
OpenGeo offers PostGIS training, including introductory and advanced sessions, as well as PostGIS core development to add new features to the project.
Our PostGIS Team
Samuel has worn multiple hats during his 12-year affair with spatial technologies: user, print cartographer, web-mapper, integrator, scripter/programmer, trainer, analyst, manager.
Paul has worked on geospatial software for over 13 years, as a programmer and consultant. He co-founded the PostGIS spatial database project in 2001, and is an active developer and project steering committee member.
About PostGIS
PostGIS “spatially enables” the PostgreSQL open source relational database. The database can then be used to store and query spatial data (points, lines and polygons).
- High performance, robust spatial database built on PostgreSQL
- Simple Features for SQL (SFSQL) compliance
- Proven reliability and transactional integrity (ACID compliance)
- Provides spatial representations of geometry types (points, lines, polygons)
- Support for common and advanced spatial operations such as geometry creation and conversion, reprojection, buffer, convex hull, generalization, union, and more
- Geodetic support for measurements across the globe/dateline
- Command-line and graphical tools for flexible management
PostGIS is widely supported as a spatial database back-end to client and server software, including:
- Open Source Server: GeoServer, Mapserver, Mapnik, DeeGree, SharpMap
- Open Source Desktop: GRASS, QGIS, uDig, gvSIG
- Proprietary Server: ArcServer, Ionic Enterprise, MapDotNet Server
- Proprietary Desktop: ArcGIS, Manifold, Safe FME, CadCorp SIS, MapInfo Professional
PostGIS @ OpenGeo
Recent Contributions
OpenGeo funds ongoing development of PostGIS as part of our larger mission to make public geodata more accessible and usable to civil society. Recent contributions include:
- Addition of a "geography" type, allowing native indexing and functions on spherical (latitude/longitude) coordinates.
- Performance improvements to the ST_Union() aggregate and all other geometry aggregates.
- Addition of a GUI for Shape file loading.
- Upgrading the underlying geometry libraries.
- Coordination of the release of PostGIS 1.5.
- Coordination and maintenance work around the release of GEOS 3.2.2.
- Organization of a second code sprint for PostGIS.
Core Development Roadmap
Tracking collections of moving objects, querying the historical data for relationships, and maintaining alarms when objects enter/leave areas is now a very common use case. The objects might be trucks, planes, boats, people, and so on. A standard data model, support functions, and API for efficient handling of this case would be helpful.
Geometry matching function in PostGIS are currently biased toward exact matches. However, spatial data is often “logically equivalent but physically disjoint” – the machine representations are close but not exact even though the geometries represent the same features.
The PostGIS spatial index currently splits pages based on longest edge. This results in trees that have sub-optimal spatial clustering in the branches, which in turn makes for sub-optimal clustering. A packed R-Tree would provide the highest performance clustering.
