[postgis-users] PostGIS 2.0 Wishlist

[Paul Ramsey]

You are correct, the request was for geodetic support, not geocentric 
support, and that support requires:

- Operations on a spher(oid)
- Indexes for a spher(oid)

Neither of which are currently available (except for distance_sphere and 
distance_spheriod).  It's fiddly stuff, and implies a fair amount of 
duplication with the existing cartesian support, that is, touching a lot 
of the code base, so it's not a small project.

P

ValiSystem wrote:

> But i would not be surprise that creating another implementation of 
> basic geos algorithms would make it possible, it would be interesting to 
> know how complex it would be, and if it could make all the others geos 
> function work auto-magically (having to fix the whole geos code would be 
> sad, long and painfull).
> 
> This is for the geometric operations. There is also a problem with the 
> RTree BBoxes, since the RTree relies on distance, and distance depends 
> of calculation formulas, for the same data, a geodetic RTree would not 
> be the same as the  RTrees we currently use. Since it could not be 
> simple as greater than a lower than operations on BBoxes corners, i 
> don't know what would be the actual runtime cost, but i'm not optimistic.
> 
> But i'm not an expert, i'm just curious to see what kind of problems it 
> raises. This is a great feature and i'd like to see it, but i would not 
> ask for something that implies too much work.


-- 

   Paul Ramsey
   Refractions Research
   http://www.refractions.net
   pramsey at refractions.net
   Phone: 250-383-3022
   Cell: 250-885-0632