[postgis-devel] Geodetic Plan

[Paul Ramsey]

On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 2:32 PM, Paragon Corporation <lr at pcorp.us> wrote:
> 1) I presume GEOS will not be supporting geodetic anytime soon so are you
> planning to build much of that functionality right into PostGIS or is there
> going to be a parallel effort there.

No GEOS geodetic any time soon. There's some work that might
eventually give JTS an abstraction to handle non-cartesian primitives,
which could then migrate to GEOS, but that's mue mue in the future. So
all the code for handling things like distances, etc, will end up in
PostGIS native.

> 2) As far as 3D indexes -- I've always wondered if its possible at least as
> a first step to have an array of 6 (or n) 2D indexes instead of 1 2D index
> and rotate the planes of the geometry such that GEOS/PostGIS is always
> looking at something that looks like X and Y.  Crazy thought so feel free to
> knock it down.

Knock, knock. That involves indexing every range twice (x/y, x/z, y/z,
see how each axis shows up twice?) and also involves independently
evaluating the indexes and merging the results. You want just one
index.

P