[postgis-users] Re: How do you use Postgis

[Andreas Neumann]

I'd like to give feedback on how we use Postgis:

Name of the Organisation:
Institute of Cartography, ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology)

we use postgis for teaching and research projects - more and more 
diploma work is done using postgis as a backend

------------

Data being managed in the database:

Project related data - currently:
Mainly topographic data
- USGS data (e.g. Yosemite National Park)
- Small scale european data
- large scale topographic data from swisstopo - our federal mapping agency
- smaller projects for teaching

-----------

how the data is accessed / manipulated

data is usually prepared in ESRI ArcGIS and later transfered to Postgis 
through the shp2pgsql loader
data is extracted with PHP and displayed in SVG mapping applications:
e.g. http://www.carto.net/williams/yosemite/ or 
http://www.carto.net/neumann/phd/prototype/
you need the Adobe SVG viewer (http://www.adobe.com/svg/viewer/install/) 
to view the data, I hope it will also soon run with native svg support 
in firefox/mozilla

we also created a simple SVG interface for digitizing/updating vector 
data in Postgis through a webbrowser
we use UMN map server to serve raster data directly to the SVG mapping 
application
http://www.carto.net/papers/svg/digi/ (still a prototype)

btw:
there is also a Postgis/PHP/SVG tutorial available at:
http://www.carto.net/papers/svg/postgis_geturl/

-----------

why you chose to use PostGIS for the application?

it supports SVG output
it is stable
it runs on Linux/Unix
it supports simplification
it is ogc compatible
it is open source
price

------------

What PostGIS feature or PostGIS-related software (not necessarily 
internal to PostGIS) would make your life much easier/better?

- i'd love to see topology and networking support, including finding shortest paths
- also, i'd love to see multi-column index support that includes a spatial index (is that already possible?, I am unsure about that)


I'd also like to thank the refractions people and the community for 
their great support!

All the best,
Andreas