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

[Obe, Regina DND\MIS]

We use it here for proximity analysis.  Part of our department is in charge
of distributing foreclosed property to developers etc. to build houses,
businesses  etc.  We use postgis to list properties by proximity in
conjunction with mapserv to display properties that are close to each other
so that if a developer wants to develop on a piece of land that is say X in
size, they will be able to get a better sense of whether it can be done.

For example if we have a property that is 1000 square feet, and another that
is right next to it that is 2000 square feet.  Then the two combined may be
utilized.

We also use it (particularly the shpdump facility) for importing project
data from our SQL Server project database into postgis  and then joining it
with spatial data to display locations of projects and how close the
projects we are working on are to each other etc.  We use shpdump to dump
this info out in shape files that we can easily distribute to people who
don't have postgis or to be use in environments that don't support postgis.
The fact that this is a shell app - made it easy to automate this process so
the shape files are generated daily at 7:00 AM.

We have other plans under way, but that's just the beginning of our use.

Hope that helps Paul.

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Ramsey [mailto:pramsey at refractions.net]
Sent: Tuesday, March 26, 2002 11:43 AM
To: postgis-users at postgis.refractions.net
Subject: [postgis-users] Who is using PostGIS and how?


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.

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