[postgis-users] Raster Support...

[Stephen Marshall]

Nicolas,

For what it's worth, I'm also interested in manipulating geo-navigated 
raster data within PostgreSQL/PostGIS.  I have not found a critical mass 
of effort in this area, but I have found some smaller efforts here and 
there.

First off, PostGIS has a rudimentary raster data type already defined.  
The data type is called "CHIP", but it currently seems to be just a 
placeholder.  

The CHIP has no functions associated with it, so there is not even a 
built-in way to populate a CHIP, let alone manipulate one.  Simon 
Benjamin has done some work to populate CHIPs using raster codecs from 
the GDAL library.  The URL for his project is here: 
http://simon.benjamin.free.fr/pgchip/.   However, I've found no efforts 
to define manipulation functions for the CHIP data type. 

Given the relatively primitive state of the CHIP type, I'm not sure if 
it is a good idea to try to build geo-raster support on top of the CHIP, 
or to define a new data type, perhaps something more like the Oracle 
SDO_RASTER type.  Are there any CHIP or raster experts out there who 
have an opinion about this?

Regarding Paul Ramsey's comment on funding a geo-raster effort, what 
resources are needed?  Are we talking about gathering together volunteer 
programmers willing to donate their time, or does this need to be 
contract work awarded to Refractions?  If the latter, what kind of 
dollar amounts (rough order of magnitude) would be necessary to get a 
geo-raster effort off the ground?

Steve Marshall