[postgis-users] PostGIS case usages

[Tom Kazimiers]

Hi Regina,

It might not really fit the book, because it's not exactly GIS, but our 
PostGIS use case is certainly an interesting one as well: As a software 
engineer at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, I work on a 
collaborative neuron reconstruction and analysis software called CATMAID 
[1] [2] (screenshot: [3]), which is used for neuroscience research. We 
use PostGIS to represent neurons in a 3D space. They consist of 3D 
points that reference their parent nodes or are the root [=soma of 
neuron] if they have no parent). Together with synapses, point clouds 
and TIN meshes for modeling compartments in a dataset, they model the 
spatial aspects of our neuroscience world. Users create those neuron 
reconstructions manually in a collaborative fashion plus segmentation 
programs can be used as additional data source. Using its spatial 
indices, PostGIS helps us to quickly query neurons in a particular field 
of view. The space of a single project contains sometimes 100s of 
millions of interconnected individual points. We also do bounding box 
intersection queries between neurons and compartment meshes, which then 
refine in the front-end by doing more precise intersection tests.

This software is used by quite a few research labs and as far as I know 
they all do their own hosting with a dedicated server and this is what 
we do as well. The reason being mainly that wth larger datasets, we 
benefit from machines with a lot of RAM (>256G), fast SSD/NVMe drives 
and many CPUs as well as fast local data access for e.g. image data.

Thanks so much for making PostGIS work well in non-GIS contexts too---it 
makes my live much easier! Looking forward to the book!

Cheers,
Tom

[1] https://www.catmaid.org
[2] https://github.com/catmaid/CATMAID
[3] https://twitter.com/tomkazimiers/status/1057657843174772737

On Fri, Oct 26, 2018 at 01:05:52PM -0400, Regina Obe wrote:
>Hey all.  So we've been in talks with our editor about having a 3rd Edition
>of PostGIS hopefully to be released around the same time as PostGIS 3.0.
>
>I think they are more or less sold on the idea except they did ask about
>current market share and usage.
>
>Part of the reason for that is our previous editions focused a lot on  "How
>do I use this function or do this weird sounding thing that only GIS people
>can make sense of"  instead of "How do I do this real world thing"
>
>So one of the thoughts was having our table of contents be more like "How do
>I do this with PostGIS" in somewhat laymen terms that most people can relate
>to - like Political Districting, Real Estate analysis (walk scores,
>elevation measurements to determine viablility of building on a plot of
>land)
> without scaring people off with "real world things" they can't relate to or
>in overly techy terms.
>
>Also since the 2nd Edition (which was in 2015 super ancient now since the
>New shiny version at the time was 2.1 and 2.1 is not even supported
>anymore).
>Other major thing changed is a lot of people are deploying PostGIS on cloud
>offerings like Amazon RDS, Microsoft Azure, and Google PostgreSQL for Cloud
>so we plan to cover a bit about some things relevant in those that may not
>be relevant when deploying on your own server.
>
>That said, if people can respond with what things they are currently using
>PostGIS for and also what hosting they are using for PostGIS, that would be
>helpful for us to get a better idea of focus points.
>
>It'd be great if you posted on the list, but if you are shy or need your
>usage anonymized, you can write directly to me.
>
>Thanks,
>Regina
>
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