PostGIS

Spatial and Geographic objects for PostgreSQL

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PostGIS for fast prototyping and Research

Author: Rémi Cura  2016/04/04  in casestudy ( academic, phd, power usage )

I used extensively postgis (+ecosystem) for my phd thesis, in several ways. The first is that PostGIS is a good steady horse (elephant?): a database is the perfect place to store a lot of very different information in the same place and put them in relation. For geospatial data, postgis means you always have a way to put data in relation (are they at the same place?).

1. So we have a vehicle with lots of sensors (camera, lidar, gps, etc.) Postgis is the perfect candidate to store metadata of all of this. For instance I would store the image position, the lidar points using pgpointcloud, the trajectory, the metadata,etc. Postgis advanced linear referencing capabilities means its possible to deal with the temporal aspect of the data as well.

2. Second usage is PostGIS ecosystem. Postgis has a strong ecosystem, and that alone is a very good reason to use it. This ecosystem is even wider because so many tools can read/write into PostGIS. I mentioned pgpointcloud, but postgis_topology is the base of my work, and I also used pgrouting to perform graph analysis and road network reconstruction, and postgis raster to store and use some aerial images, as well as postgres extension (text analysis).

3. Third usage: power user Now for the advanced part, postgis is so reliable and flexible it can be abused to perform all sort of nice things, especially in the field of automatism. In my phd I perform road generation for Paris fully in the database, with a lot of calls to postgis geometrical functions.

Furthermore, PostGIS + trigger + any GIS can be made into potent interactive system , and because of the whole transaction stuff, multi user is facilitated.

More Case Studies

Howard Hughes Medical Institute

As a software engineer at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, I work on a collaborative neuron reconstruction and analysis software called CATMAID 1 (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 life much easier!

Vanguard Appraisals

Vanguard Appraisals is new to the GIS world. In fact, we aren’t really in the GIS world; we just kind of brush up against it. We do mass property appraisal for entire county and city jurisdictions, and we develop software to collect, price and maintain values. We also host assessment data online so that homeowners can search and find property information much simpler from the comfort of their own home. Our software and websites are used in 7 states (IA, IL, MN, MO, NE, ND, SD).

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Nautilytics Case Study

Nautilytics is a small data visualization and GIS startup based out of Boston, MA. We use PostGIS and PostgreSQL, among other open-source tools to build powerful web applications for US government organizations, public, and private sector companies.

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