[postgis-users] Measure distance to nearest border

[Nicklas Avén]

Hi As I understand you you want to get the distance from each cell to the closest neighbour country. Then, why don't you just query the distance from your cell to closest country with other gwcode?Maybe something like: Create table borddisttest asSelect ST_Distance(st_collect(b.the_geom), c.centroid)from cshapes a, cshapes b, pgfinal2008 cwhere a.gwcode=c.gwcode and b.gwcode != c.gwcode and st_intersects(a.the_geom, b.the_geom)group by c.gwcode and c.the_geom;
With some tweaking like ordering the cells by gwcode I don't think the intersection calculation have to be done for each cell. Otherwise this is a very bad approach if there are many grid-cells. indexing on gwcode on both tables and spatial index on the country geoms for the intersection will also be of importance. I don't understand:geography(pgfinal2008.centroid) what does geography means here? I would also go for calculating the centroids on the fly. It should be fast and you will not get the trouble of updating the centroid column if adjustuing the grid. About doing calculations comparing geometries inside a dataset you use self join.  You can join a table with itself as long as you put an alias so you can identify them like I did above with a, b and c Well, I am not sure I answered the right question but anyway...HTHNicklas
2010-10-13 Andreas Forø Tollefsen wrote:

>
Hi all,>

>>
I have two datasets. On is a quadrate grid, and the other is the boundaries of all countries.>
What i want to do is to measure the distance from each centroid of the grid cells to the nearest border, but not all borders. Only the international.>

>>
First i convert my country polygon dataset into line features:>
>
select gwcode, gwsyear, gweyear, ST_Boundary(the_geom) AS line Into cshapes_line from cshapes;>

>>
Next i calculate the distance from the centroid of each cell to the nearest border where the gwcode (country code) of the cell is the same as the gwcode in the line feature.>
drop table if exists borddisttest;>
select pgfinal2008.cell, pgfinal2008.gwcode, ST_ShortestLine(pgfinal2008.centroid, st_boundary(cshapes.the_geom)) >
AS shortestline, ST_Distance(geography(pgfinal2008.centroid), st_boundary(cshapes.the_geom))/1000 AS borddist >
into borddisttest >
from cshapes, pgfinal2008 >
where cshapes.gwcode = pgfinal2008.gwcode;>

>>
The problem here is that when using ST_Boundary, it converts all boundaries into lines, while i only want to get the boundaries where two polygons with different gwcodes meet.>
The lines where two countries meet are overlapping, meaning these borders have two gwcodes but in different line entries.>

>>
Is there a way to calculate the overlaps within one dataset? If i could do this, then i could put a clause so the measurement only measures to lines with 2 or more gwcodes.>

>>
Thanks.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/postgis-users/attachments/20101013/00e9c44a/attachment.html>