[postgis-users] Who is using PostGIS and how?

[Paul Ramsey]

Wow, no responses at all the first time!

OK, there are over 160 of you, someone must be using PostGIS for a real
application. :) I really do want to hear, since I'll be talking to a
room full of people whose first reaction will be "what kind of lunatic
would entrust their business to a product built by people in their spare
time". I want to be able to say "well, *this* kind of lunatic!"... I
would also be interested to hear your reasons for selecting PostGIS over
one of the commercial alternatives.

I'll go first:

For example, Refractions is using PostGIS to store and manage a very
large and highly relational road network database. The use of a RDBMS
allows us to create different output "snapshots" of the data for
different users of the road network, since each user has very different
data standards. A new view of the data is just a new SQL query away.
Once the data is in a RDBMS, other things become suddenly much easier:
we have prototyped a geocoder which uses the backend database to convert
addresses to coordinate information, and used the Mapserver/PostGIS
connector to visualize the results.