[postgis-users] Re: How do you use PostGIS? City Of Boston - Dep artment of Neighborhood Development

[Obe, Regina DND\MIS]

>>> - Name of the organization
City Of Boston, Department of Neighborhood Development (DND)

>>> - Data being managed in the database

City Owned property, parcels and owner addresses, building footprints, dnd
projects

>>> - How the data is being accessed / manipulated

Mostly thru UMN Mapserver, ASP, PHP - eventually thru ASP.NET as well.

>>> - Why you chose to use PostGIS for the application

1. Needed an affordable and easy way to query spatial data along with our
relational data that was more powerful than shape files.  We were already
familiar with SQL so it was a natural extension.
2. Works well with UMN Mapserver which we discovered before we discovered
PostGIS.
3. I like the fact that it follows well-defined standards - e.g ANSI SQL
92/SQL 93, SFSQL, SVG, WKB etc. because this provides a potential for
greater collaborative work in the future as these emerging standards are
becoming more adopted.

>>> - What PostGIS feature or PostGIS-related software (not necessarily
internal to PostGIS) would make your life much easier/better?  It would be
nice if there were more tools that work with PostGIS - e.g. toolkits for
better integrating with ASP.NET and more desktop tools, plugins to leverage
PostGIS data with tools like ArcGIS, MapInfo.  Over the years - I've seen
more and more tools arise that support PostGIS, so I am very optomistic.  I
am also happy that ESRI seems to support WMS/WFS client functionality in
their ArcGIS products in ArcGIS 9.0 Service Pack 2.  Haven't tried it yet
though.