[postgis-users] How to design a database for continents, countries, regions, cities and POIs?

[pcreso at pcreso.com]

Are you planning to store multiple versions of these polygons, for zoom layers?

Generally you need a high res version (eg: coastline) when zoomed in (large scale) and a lower resolution version when zoomed out (you can't see & don't need the detail.

This may or may not have an impact on your eventual data model, but it is worth ensuring you take this into account during the data modeling process. You can have a model where each feature has multiple geometry columns associated with it in the one table, or an approach which has the geometries in separate tables, using ID's to link to the aspatial attributes. The former is a simpler, monolithic solution, the latter is more complex but allows more use of tablespaces & underlying Postgres optimisation. 

You may also find you need to carry out joins (identify relationships between types of polygon, eg: cities within counties within states within countries, and this may perform better with a denormalised structure with separate tables for different categories of polygon. 

One example you might look at is the OSM data model. Not quite what you are describing, but a robust & well tested model for global roads & related spatial data, which does not use Postgis at all. 

http://booki.flossmanuals.net/openstreetmap/_draft/_v/1.0/the-osm-data-model/

--- On Mon, 4/9/12, mkubenka <mkubenka at gmail.com> wrote:

From: mkubenka <mkubenka at gmail.com>
Subject: [postgis-users] How to design a database for continents, countries, regions, cities and POIs?
To: postgis-users at postgis.refractions.net
Date: Monday, April 9, 2012, 11:31 PM

I'm brand new to GIS programming and I am designing a GIS application. Target
is to create system with continents, countries, regions (including states,
sub-regions, provinces), cities and places in cities. Each of this elements
will contain some text information and related stuff. As database we are
going to use PostgreSQL with PostGIS.

My question is how to design database for this system? I was thinking of 2
tables polygons and points, but I'm not sure if it's good way of thinking.

--
View this message in context: http://postgis.17.n6.nabble.com/How-to-design-a-database-for-continents-countries-regions-cities-and-POIs-tp4715669p4715669.html
Sent from the PostGIS - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
_______________________________________________
postgis-users mailing list
postgis-users at postgis.refractions.net
http://postgis.refractions.net/mailman/listinfo/postgis-users
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/postgis-users/attachments/20120409/8050e049/attachment.html>