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

[Eric Randall]

--Who are you?

Eric Randall, GIS Admin/Analyst, County of Erie, Pennsylvania

--What are you using PostGIS for?

1.) In conjunction with a commercial enterprise GIS implementation and plan/parcel data conversion project,
we are using PostGIS for attribute conflation between older and newly compiled vector data.
PostGIS will also be used as a "counter-enterprise GIS" as it were, and run parallel to the commercial implementation.  
This will minimize the expansion of software licensing and maintenance costs for departmental, municipal, 
and other users as the use of GIS grows. 

2.) In our involvement with a five County GIS data sharing project in NW PA, we use PostGIS to combine, transform, and restructure
data layers from the five counties to a common format based on the Pennsylvania Geospatial Data Sharing Standard (PGDSS).  PostGIS
is ideal for this type of non-interactive, scheduled data provisioning. 


--Why did you choose PostGIS?

As an advocate of open source, as a public employee, and as a taxpayer, it's a responsible choice.
PostGIS is powerful, economical, educational, and powerful(I like powerful). It is an excellent piece of work and
has a really big future. 


--What makes you happy about your PostGIS installation?

Answering this would require more typing than I'm up to at the moment. Looking down the road I see an
ever increasing role for PostGIS and other open source technologies in the organization.  We will be
following it's development and continue to put it to use.  Many thanks to the developers and contributors. 


--What makes you unhappy about your PostGIS installation?

Don't know yet.  Whenever I haven't been able to do something with PostGIS, the problem has usually been
me.  I just downloaded and installed Solaris 10 6/06 on a test machine and haven't tried PostGIS with
Sun's packaged PostgreSQL yet.  That makes me unhappy.