[postgis-users] The Old Who is using PostGIS survey again?

[Mark Fenbers]

> 1) How you use PostGIS?
> We use it to: a) get a list of the Ham Radio operators and trained spotters within a 20 mile buffer of a Tornado Watch polygon, b) to determine the Voronoi polygons surrounding each weather surveillence radar so as to find which radar is closest to a given rain gauge.  The Voronoi polygons change often as radars go down for maintenance and come back online.  c) given hand-drawn polygons of Flood potential, we determine how many floods actually occurred within those polygons for verification statistics.  d) We check manually-entered lat/lon data for accuracy by verifying the given coordinates really do lay within the specified state, county, drainage basin, and zone it is claimed to be in.
>
> 2) What you find useful about it over anything else?
> I can filter out unwanted data right from the SQL.  Formerly, this had to be done using post-processing software after the data was fetched from the database.
>
> 3) Why you think there should be any book written focused on its use and of
> course if such a thing were to exist, would you buy it?
> PostGIS allows so much more power (than without it) to make decisions or reports right from the database.  For example, with PostGIS, you can now right a query to "show me all the cities that are within 50 miles of Interstate-70 AND are within the Central Time Zone", or "show me all the cell and radio towers that are within a 10-mile buffer of the Severe Thunderstorm Warning polygon that was just issued", or "show me all the hurricances or tropical storms whose paths have come into the states oF Georgia or South Carolina in the past 50 years".  To be able to show information like this (and more complicated scenarios), users need to know how to set up geospatial queries that can show them this type of information.  They need to know what all the capabilities are and the details of each.  A book with lot of examples can show users first hand the power of spatial queries.
>   
Mark
US Dept of Commerce
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
National Weather Service