[postgis-devel] [raster] Architecture wiki document contribution

Bryce L Nordgren bnordgren at gmail.com
Thu Jun 30 09:43:01 PDT 2011


I like the goal of seamless raster/vector operations. However, I get the
sense that no one has a real good feel for what that means yet. One and two
raster operations seem to be covered. Purely vector operations seem to be
covered. Mixing up rasters and vectors is not something I've seen a plan
for, aside from some examples for specific cases in the original
presentation. It's my firm belief that in order to accomplish this goal,
it's necessary to figure out what that means sooner rather than later.
Figuring out what this means (comprehensively, in general; and not for
specific cases) is what the architecture document is all about.

To be clear, the architecture document has nothing to do with how rasters
are stored or accessed (one row, many rows, out-database, in Oracle Spatial,
on a WCS, etc.) so our passionate dialog concerning what and how to "tile"
rasters is not related to this concept at all. It discusses, in the most
general way, the basic differences and similarities between geometry,
geometry-value, and gridded data types; articulating the difference between
"information types" and "data types". It also observes that there is a lot
of commonality in all operations which return the raster data type, and
articulates a utility similar to rt_raster_raster_op_engine() on ticket
1058.  I haven't figured out if geometry/geometry-value returning functions
have enough in common to identify a similar utility for them. These are key,
fundamental concepts for evenhandedly treating different representations of
the same underlying information.

I mean for this document to be a starting point, but it's hard for the
document to evolve when y'all can't edit it. It really belongs on the
PostGIS wiki, but I don't have write access. So if one of you fine folks
could copy it off of my wiki onto yours, I'd be grateful. Or tell me it's
not something you want there. Either way, I'm going on a two week vacation
starting Saturday, and I'd like to try and make it possible for it to evolve
while I'm gone.

https://collab.firelab.org/software/projects/modisfire/wiki/Seamless_spatial_operations_architecture

Bryce
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