[postgis-devel] [postgis-users] PostGIS case usages

[Regina Obe]

Tom,

That's a pretty nice use case and one I've thought of coming from a Bioelectronics/Biomechanics educational background.

I think a lot more people would be using PostGIS if they saw it as a tool set of tools for visualizing and analyzing space, instead of "a toolset for GIS"
The GIS word seems to be a turn-off for a lot of people who have spatial problems to solve but don't think of themselves as GIS practioners.

I much prefer the term "Spatial" than GIS because it really focuses on what I think makes PostGIS great - "A tool for analyzing space"

Thanks,
Regina

> -----Original Message-----
> From: postgis-users [mailto:postgis-users-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf
> Of Tom Kazimiers
> Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2018 3:16 PM
> To: PostGIS Users Discussion <postgis-users at lists.osgeo.org>
> Cc: 'PostGIS Development Discussion' <postgis-devel at lists.osgeo.org>
> Subject: Re: [postgis-users] PostGIS case usages
> 
> Hi Regina,
> 
> It might not really fit the book, because it's not exactly GIS, but our PostGIS
> use case is certainly an interesting one as well: As a software engineer at the
> Howard Hughes Medical Institute, I work on a collaborative neuron
> reconstruction and analysis software called CATMAID [1] [2] (screenshot: [3]),
> which is used for neuroscience research. We use PostGIS to represent neurons
> in a 3D space. They consist of 3D points that reference their parent nodes or
> are the root [=soma of neuron] if they have no parent). Together with
> synapses, point clouds and TIN meshes for modeling compartments in a
> dataset, they model the spatial aspects of our neuroscience world. Users
> create those neuron reconstructions manually in a collaborative fashion plus
> segmentation programs can be used as additional data source. Using its
> spatial indices, PostGIS helps us to quickly query neurons in a particular field
> of view. The space of a single project contains sometimes 100s of millions of
> interconnected individual points. We also do bounding box intersection
> queries between neurons and compartment meshes, which then refine in the
> front-end by doing more precise intersection tests.
> 
> This software is used by quite a few research labs and as far as I know they all
> do their own hosting with a dedicated server and this is what we do as well.
> The reason being mainly that wth larger datasets, we benefit from machines
> with a lot of RAM (>256G), fast SSD/NVMe drives and many CPUs as well as
> fast local data access for e.g. image data.
> 
> Thanks so much for making PostGIS work well in non-GIS contexts too---it
> makes my live much easier! Looking forward to the book!
> 
> Cheers,
> Tom
> 
> [1] https://www.catmaid.org
> [2] https://github.com/catmaid/CATMAID
> [3] https://twitter.com/tomkazimiers/status/1057657843174772737
> 
> On Fri, Oct 26, 2018 at 01:05:52PM -0400, Regina Obe wrote:
> >Hey all.  So we've been in talks with our editor about having a 3rd
> >Edition of PostGIS hopefully to be released around the same time as PostGIS
> 3.0.
> >
> >I think they are more or less sold on the idea except they did ask
> >about current market share and usage.
> >
> >Part of the reason for that is our previous editions focused a lot on
> >"How do I use this function or do this weird sounding thing that only
> >GIS people can make sense of"  instead of "How do I do this real world
> thing"
> >
> >So one of the thoughts was having our table of contents be more like
> >"How do I do this with PostGIS" in somewhat laymen terms that most
> >people can relate to - like Political Districting, Real Estate analysis
> >(walk scores, elevation measurements to determine viablility of
> >building on a plot of
> >land)
> > without scaring people off with "real world things" they can't relate
> >to or in overly techy terms.
> >
> >Also since the 2nd Edition (which was in 2015 super ancient now since
> >the New shiny version at the time was 2.1 and 2.1 is not even supported
> >anymore).
> >Other major thing changed is a lot of people are deploying PostGIS on
> >cloud offerings like Amazon RDS, Microsoft Azure, and Google PostgreSQL
> >for Cloud so we plan to cover a bit about some things relevant in those
> >that may not be relevant when deploying on your own server.
> >
> >That said, if people can respond with what things they are currently
> >using PostGIS for and also what hosting they are using for PostGIS,
> >that would be helpful for us to get a better idea of focus points.
> >
> >It'd be great if you posted on the list, but if you are shy or need
> >your usage anonymized, you can write directly to me.
> >
> >Thanks,
> >Regina
> >
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