[postgis-users] Oh! Topology!

[Brent Wood]

--- Stephen Woodbridge <woodbri at swoodbridge.com> wrote:

> Paul et al,
> 
> I saw your post about the wiki and took a look and found all kinds of 
> cool things about Topology. Very cool! Awesome!
>
> Ok, so the silliest things excite me, but this is very cool ...
>

Well, I'm afraid I share your fetish :-) A fully topological open source
spatial data management tool will be wunnerful!! 

I used the commercial GIS Genamap for years, until the Open Source offerings
matured enough it redundant. Genamap is Linux based, and has a very nice
topological data model. That is the one thing wot I really miss in the Open
Source GIS community.

GDAL/OGR/Proj4 compares pretty well to the Genamap accessor approach for
abstracting data access, and mapserver meets any web mapping capabilities I
need. PostGIS at least matches the data management & query tools. I reckon QGIS
is actually way better than the data browsing tools bundled with Genamap, and
is getting there for georeferencing & heads up digitising. GRASS/R/SAGA/GMT
provide the analysis tools, & GMT (along with Image Magick & the GIMP) produces
scientific publication quality output that rivals or exceeds the quality of
many commercial packages. OpenDX provides multidimensional visualisations
comparable to Matlab or IDL.

And my apologies to the many other OS GIS packages not mentioned here! Missing
them out is more an indication of the wealth of tools available than any
criticism by omission.

Way to go, Open Source :-)


So thanks Paul.... if I can help with this, let me know...


Cheers,

   Brent Wood