[postgis-users] Massive Lidar Dataset Datatype Suggestions?

[Norman Vine]

Brent Wood writes:
> 
> --- Gerry Creager N5JXS <gerry.creager at tamu.edu> wrote:
> 
> > Hmmm... Can we start thinking in terms of a NetCDF data structure?
> > 
> > Robert W. Burgholzer wrote:
> > > Perhaps I've weighed in on this before, so excuse me if I sound like a 
> > > broken record. This situation appears to me to be best suited to a 
> > > raster analysis. I would like to see (help to develop) this type of 
> > > functionality in postgis.
> 
> I believe Lamar Owen, a Postgres developer, was looking at enhancements to
> Postgres to facilitate it's use as a radio telescope plate data warehouse.
> 
> http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2003-07/msg01365.php
> 
> This was a while ago... I don't know what has happenned since then... but it
> may be worth getting in touch...

I think that Gerry is on the right track here.

My suggestion is to use something like NetCDF or HDF to store the raw data
and use PostGIS to store the extents and properties < field names > history
metadata and actual 'Location' < network address >  of each data set.

However I think the HDF may be better suited to storing derived products or
views of the same dataset.

For those of you that use Python I have found pyTables a *useful* tool and 
all operations < just python scripts > on a dataset stored in pyTables can 
easily be saved in the PostGIS DB as simple ASCII strings for metadata
purposes.  

Note Python array operations are very similar to the eqivalent operations
in IDL or Matlab.

http://pytables.sourceforge.net/html/WelcomePage.html
< snipped from above >
"PyTables is a very well designed interface to the HDF5 libraries. 
It fills a gap for people using python/Numeric/numarray who need to deal with 
large data sets and convenient and fast data analysis tools." 
said Ernesto Rodriguez, Group Supervisor in the Radar Science and Engineering 
Section at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
</>

Cheers

Norman