[postgis-users] PostGIS and TIGER/GML

[Joshua Lieberman]

Paul,

Not sure we have met, but I've been messing about in OGC for a few 
years and, following a company transition (Syncline to Traverse + 
EoGeo), I am becoming very involved in the use of open-source software. 
I have also benefitted greatly from the materials published out of the 
recent open-source / MapServer Users meeting and am now regretting that 
I was unable to attend.

Recently I've stood up several servers for the U.S. Census Bureau 
(working with Paul Daisey) using Linux, MapServer, and PostGIS. Very 
impressive capabilities for a small footprint. After a lot of futzing 
around, I was also pleased to get PostGIS 0.9.0 running on Mac OS X 
10.3.

It was necessary, however, to simplify the TIGER/GML data considerably 
in order to serve it up. I am curious now about any plans or ideas for 
PostGIS to support spatial data with a structural complexity more akin 
to what GML is capable of encoding, perhaps by being able to use 
complex objects in other than geometry columns, or by spreading complex 
properties among several tables. I would be interested in your views on 
this, or to chat at some point about it. It's a discussion to have with 
developers of Geoserver and MapServer as well. It appears that the 
deegree developers are themselves thinking along the lines of using 
whatever object serialization the java package "hibernate" performs, 
which worries me somewhat.

We do have some development capabilities to contribute to addressing 
this problem, if a consensus can develop on what approach to take.

Thanks.

Cheers,

Josh Lieberman
Traverse Technologies -and- EoGeo
(857) 919-1071