[postgis-users] Re: PostGIS and ESRI

[Paul Ramsey]

Well, a couple things have happened in the last couple months both good
and bad. The bad is that the WFS spec seems to be taking a very long
time to actually get out the door of OpenGIS. An approved WFS spec is
something which vendors can build to and release to, and will give
backends like PostGIS an actual fighting chance.

The good is several fold:

- Frank has done some interesting work on OLE DB providers, and there
has probably proved the point that an ArcGIS OLE provider for PostGIS
directly, or PostGIS via OGR is possible. 
- I have done some work with ArcIMS emulation and have proven to myself
that it would be possible to put an ArcIMS Feature Service emulation
layer on top of PostGIS.
- The effort to finally get full SFSQL in PostGIS seems about to take
wing, one way or another.

However, the two technical possibilities I have given about are
read-only solutions, and therefor not a complete journey to the promised
land. Also, neither is actually *done*, they have just been investigated
enough to assure ourselves that neither is completely impossible.

BTW, it is possible to view PostGIS data in ArcIMS, via mapserver and my
rough ims emulator. :/ Ugly and rather ineffective, but a proof of
concept.

P.

Tyler Mitchell wrote:
> 
> Hi guys, particularly Frank and Paul,
> Re: these messages (below) from last fall.  Could either of you, or others
> comment on where things have come/gone in the meantime?  I.e. how close
> (read: how much development needed) are we to having something to work with
> ArcGIS in particular.  I know there's been a lot of dialogue going around
> on this stuff, but I thought maybe it would be a good time especially for
> new users like to me to get a bit of an update on using PostGIS with OpenEV
> or and with ArcGIS (via OLE DB).
> Any comments?
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> [postgis] Re: PostGIS and ESRI
> Paul Ramsey postgis at yahoogroups.com
> Fri, 21 Sep 2001 15:36:19 -0700
> 
> "Matt.Wilkie" wrote:
> >
> > Do you see PostGIS ever being in a position to work with (and/or
> > replace) ArcSDE and [Oracle|DB2|SQL|etc]?
> 
> Hi Matt,
> 
> PostGIS/PostgreSQL should, long term, be able to replace ArcSDE, Oracle
> Spatial, and DB2 Spatial. That is the goal. That is why we are working
> so hard to follow the OpenGIS "Simple Features for SQL" specification.
> 
> When you ask whether PostGIS can "work with" ArcSDE/OracleSpatial/DB2 I
> assume you are actually asking whether the desktop software which
> currently works with those products (mostly ArcGIS/ArcView/ArcINFO but
> also GeoMedia and MapInfo and AutoCAD) will eventually be able to work
> with PostGIS as a spatial backend. And in the short term the answer is
> "no", because ESRI holds an effective desktop monopoly on GIS
> viewers/editors which they are using to push their own client/server
> protocol: the protocol used by ArcSDE.
> 
> In the longer term (12-24 months) there is a moderate probability that
> the Web Feature Server standard will begin to open up the client/server
> communication path, and as the commercial vendors start to implement WFS
> in their software, we will already be there. Most of the hard stuff
> about WFS (transactions, locking, intersections, buffers, other
> topologic operations) can be done by a spatial database, if you have
> one, and we do (or at least, we will). But that is a ways out.
> 
> In the short term, there is Mapserver as a PostGIS client. I imagine
> sometime soon, either GRASS or OpenEV or OpenMap will end up supporting
> PostGIS as a data source as well. But it'll be slow going and for now
> we'll be writing our own clients. If we're lucky, forward-looking
> companies like Byers will include PostGIS as a part of their own desktop
> GIS software offerings. The future is hard to see, but I think we're on
> the right track.
> 
> Hope that helps,
> Paul
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> [postgis] Re: PostGIS and ESRI
> Frank Warmerdam postgis at yahoogroups.com
> Fri, 21 Sep 2001 22:16:52 -0400
> 
> Guys,
> 
> I just wanted to add a few points to this.
> 
>   o OpenEV support PostGIS now via the OGR link for reading, though not yet
> for
>     update.  It would be sweet to add write back to OGR to OpenEV, and
> perhaps
>     some smarts for browsing tables, and doing spatial and attribute
> queries
>     from OpenEV.
> 
>   o It should be possible to serve read-only data to ArcGIS from PostGIS
> via
>     an OGR based OLE DB provider, though I haven't tried building the
> PostGIS
>     link for OGR on Windows yet, nor will this work fully till the upcoming
>     ArcGIS Service Pack 2 release this fall.
> 
> I would really like to update OGR to match with all the PostGIS 0.6
> services
> and get a nice Linux build of OGR tools that can be used as an auxilary
> set of tools for loading PostGIS, and doing operations like reprojecting
> layers.
> 
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