[postgis-users] PostGIS Usage Survey

[Paul Ramsey]

For example, here is a reply from us :)

--

We are Refractions Research, and we used PostGIS to complete a spatial 
data processing contract for a government client here in British Columbia.

The project was to create DEM rasters for the whole province, starting 
from a TIN. The challenge was to manage the process of creating the 
raster files, and to apply some corrections to "flat" areas of the 
province (lakes and oceans). We stored all the lakes and ocean polygons 
in PostGIS, generated averages elevations for them by masking them onto 
the rasters, and applied those elevations back onto the raster to create 
corrected data. We also stored all the grid file extents, and used that 
data control the generation of the DEM files.

We used a number of interfaces to the database, but primarily perl and 
libpq. All the automatic raster data processing work was based on perl 
batch scripts running against data in the database and then spawing 
other C programs to do the work.

We chose PostGIS because it was a very tractable tool. We could easily 
write custom client apps to pull and push data into it and of course it 
was fast Fast FAst FAST.

In the end, we created several cuts of raster DEM products, hillshades, 
aspect grids, slope grids, in three projections and two formats. Total 
data volume of over 150Gb.

--

Paul Ramsey wrote:
> PostGIS'ers:
> 
> The time has come again for my annual query of our list. The last time I 
> asked this, about a year ago, there were ~130 people on the list. This 
> time, there are ~260 people. So by one metric at least we are growing 
> quickly in numbers. We also have ~350 source code downloads a month 
> these days, up from ~120 a year ago.
> 
> Anyhow, the question is this:
> 
>   "How are you using PostGIS in your organization?"
> 
> I am preparing for an "Open Source in Government" conference in 
> Washington DC, and would like to be able to point out some use cases of 
> PostGIS in action.
> 
> If you could say in your response, at a minimum:
> 
> - Name of the organization
> - Data being managed in the database
> - How the data is being accessed / manipulated
> - Why you chose to use PostGIS for the application
> 
> Thanks so much!
> 
> Paul
> 


-- 
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      /
      | Paul Ramsey
      | Refractions Research
      | Email: pramsey at refractions.net
      | Phone: (250) 885-0632
      \_