[postgis-users] PostGIS temporal support

[Barend Kobben]

Hi Sinan,

As stated by another poster, temporal support is inherent of the way you set
up your DB schema. In order to be able to do 'temporal' things, you make
sure there's temporal info in the tables, such as creation dates, expiration
dates, validity periods, etcetera for relevant objects. Then you can reason
with these to retrieve objects valid for specific times, time periods
etcetera. An excellent source on this theory and practical examples of a
schema that allows this, can be found in [1]. The practical aplication can
be done in any decent DBMS, so certainly in Postgres, with or without
PostGIS, there's all kinds of date/time functionality that can help you with
that and if not enough, you can make your own!

The spatial part is covered by PostGIS, and the only thing you have to take
care of there is to follow existing standards on how to store time/date info
in the "geo-world". This concerns mainly the ISO 8601 standard and the use
of these  in the geo domain is described in various OGC documents you can
find in [2] (specifically the Web Map Service Implementation Specification
has useful paragraph on it).

Hope this helps you laong a bit!


[1] Parent, C., Spaccapietra, S., and Zimanyi, E. Conceptual modeling for
traditional and spatio - temporal applications : the MADS approach.
Springer, Berlin etc., 2006.

[2] OGC. Open Geospatial Consortium Home Page.
http://www.opengeospatial.org/, last accessed Jan 2009.

Yours,
-- 
Barend Köbben
International Institute for Geo-Information
Sciences and Earth Observation (ITC)
PO Box 6, 7500AA Enschede, The Netherlands
+31 (0)53 4874253


> 
> On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 11:28 AM, sinan keskin <sinankeskin1453 at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
>> I want to study on spatial & temporal databases.
>> I read some document about PostGIS and it is written that PostGIS adds
>> capabilities to an existing relational database engine, in this case
>> PostgreSQL.  In fact, PostGIS could be re-named as ³PostgreSQL Spatial².
>> So it looks PostGIS supports spatial database functionalities but I couldn't
>> find any information about if PostGIS supports temporal database
>> functionalities.
>> Have you any idea about temporal support of PostGIS? Does PostGIS support
>> temporal data?
>> Thanks... 
>> 
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>> 
>> 
> 

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