[postgis-users] Request for open postgis datasets

[Chip Masters]

PostGIS Users,

With help from several of you, I've gotten PostGIS
1.0.1 + PostgreSQL 8.0.3 + GEOS 2.1.2 + Proj 4.4.9 up
and running, and I've ran the OGC compliance tests
provided in the postgis distrubution. Now I need some
data to continue my integration work, and I was hoping
that some of you may know where I can find, or can
even provide me with, some data that I can use. First,
let me explain a little about what I'm trying to do w/
PostGIS:

I work at Cycorp (http://www.cyc.com) which is the
company Doug Lenat founded in 1997 to further the Cyc
project, which he began at MCC back in c. 1985. I
expect some of you have heard of Cyc before, but if
not, our website has a nice overview of our main
goals.

I am the lead developer at Cycorp for our efforts to
build a geospatial ontology in our knowledge base and
to 'spatially enable' Cyc by connecting it to spatial
databases which it can use as a backend for storing,
querying, and manipulating spatial data. We decided to
do our main research using PostGIS because of its OGC
compliance and because we already have a lot of good
experience working with PostgreSQL.

Now that I've got PostGIS running and have read the
SFS, I am ready to begin testing our translations of
CycL queries into SQL92 With Geometry Types queries,
but I need useful datasets. The OGC compliance dataset
is a start, but what I'd really like is general data
about real places. For instance, if anyone had a
PostGIS database of polygons for all the countries of
the world, or all the states in the Union, this would
be ideal. Alternatively, I know where to find
shapefile data for such things, but I don't know of a
straightforward way to translate shapefiles into OGC
SFS compliant data. Does anyone know of tools for
converting shapefiles?

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer.

Chip Masters


P.S. Just so this interaction isn't just one-way with
you guys helping me out, if any PostGIS developers
have an interest in, or need for geographic ontologies
(in OWL-Full format), please let me know and I'll see
if we can get a little informal collaboration going.
My project is very small, and cannot fund any
development outside our SOW, but I can certainly
devote some of my own time to providing some examples
of the types of ontologies we're producing under this project.




		
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