[postgis-users] Latitude and Longitude format in PostGIS

[Mark Cave-Ayland]

On Wed, 2007-04-11 at 13:58 +0200, Giuseppe Molinario wrote:
> Hi everyone, 

Hi Guiseppe,

> I have a question regarding the creation in PostGIS of a table that
> contains information coming from a NMEA GPRMC text string. I get
> Lat/long coordinates which are then put into their respective columns.
> A geometry field is then created using the SRID # 4326 (WGS84 Datum -
> Geographic). 
> 
> 1. What format of Lat/long coordinates does PostGIS accept? GPRMC has
> the coordinate in this format: ddmm.mmmmm. 

PostGIS accepts coordinates in decimal degrees.

> 2. How do I project the points into WGS84UTM33N? My final goal is to
> overlay these points as a PostGIS layer on a webmap (Mapserver based)
> over other data I have which is in that projection. 

The transform() function should be able to do what you need here if you
use a version of PostGIS that has been compiled with the PROJ.4
reprojection library.

> 3. Do you know if Mapserver will re-project on the fly in my case?
> ever? or do I have to take care of this in PostGIS?

Yes. Mapserver can also reproject layers on-the-fly using PROJ.4. There
are plenty of examples on the Mapserver website at
http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu.


HTH,

Mark.