[postgis-users] Who is Using PostGIS? For What?

[Guido Lemoine]

Who are you?

Guido Lemoine, European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Fisheries 
group   

What are you using PostGIS for?

Data repository and geospatial analysis environment for fisheries data. 
At the moment,
primarily for vessel position data that we correlate with targets 
detected in SAR satellite
imagery (to support Monitoring and Control). Postgresql/Postgis is 
integrated in an
operational processing chain that produces detection results in less 
than 30 minutes after
image acquisition.
Also stores ancillary data sets (bathymetry, shoreline, etc.) and other 
fisheries data set
for cross correlaiton (effort, catches).

>     Why did you choose PostGIS?

PostGIS is mature OS geospatial API. Seamless integrated with MapServer 
presentation
layer, web services + pgpsql, shell scripting and Java. My colleague 
happily uses it with
R statistical analysis. We recently demonstrated integration with WW2D+1 
(3 D), which
took less than 1 day.

>     What makes you happy about your PostGIS installation?

Shows that GIS is not a science, just a programming API (most folks do 
not realise this).
GIS was created by geographers, PostGIS by IT experts. Makes a big 
difference. No
convoluted proprietary formats required. Efficient, seamless and free. 
Nobody beats that.
Great user community. Sometimes quicker than google :-)

>     What makes you unhappy about your PostGIS installation?
>
Migration from 7.x to 8.x was a bit of a pain. Otherwise no problems. 
Wishes for the
future would include better integration with raster processing and 
handling of time
sequences (most of our data is dynamic), but this is not necessarily a 
Postgis issue.

> Those who want to remain in confidence, but still want to make their
> feelings known, please respond to me directly.
>
> I am going to be writing up a handful of PostGIS users into full 
> white-papers for the web site and my own conference talks, so please, 
> if you think you have a compelling PostGIS story, start by giving us a 
> summary here on the list!
>
> I love hearing these stories!
>
> Paul
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