Chapter 1. Introduction

Table of Contents

PostGIS is a spatial extension for the PostgreSQL relational database that was created by Refractions Research Inc, as a spatial database technology research project. Refractions is a GIS and database consulting company in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, specializing in data integration and custom software development.

PostGIS is now a project of the OSGeo Foundation and is developed and funded by many FOSS4G developers and organizations all over the world that gain great benefit from its functionality and versatility.

The PostGIS project development group plans on supporting and enhancing PostGIS to better support a range of important GIS functionality in the areas of OGC and SQL/MM spatial standards, advanced topological constructs (coverages, surfaces, networks), data source for desktop user interface tools for viewing and editing GIS data, and web-based access tools.

1.1. Project Steering Committee

The PostGIS Project Steering Committee (PSC) coordinates the general direction, release cycles, documentation, and outreach efforts for the PostGIS project. In addition the PSC provides general user support, accepts and approves patches from the general PostGIS community and votes on miscellaneous issues involving PostGIS such as developer commit access, new PSC members or significant API changes.

Raúl Marín Rodríguez

MVT support, Bug fixing, Performance and stability improvements, GitHub curation, alignment of PostGIS with PostgreSQL releases

Regina Obe

CI and website maintenance, Windows production and experimental builds, documentation, alignment of PostGIS with PostgreSQL releases, X3D support, TIGER geocoder support, management functions.

Darafei Praliaskouski

Index improvements, bug fixing and geometry/geography function improvements, SFCGAL, raster, GitHub curation, and ci maintenance.

Paul Ramsey (Chair)

Co-founder of PostGIS project. General bug fixing, geography support, geography and geometry index support (2D, 3D, nD index and anything spatial index), underlying geometry internal structures, GEOS functionality integration and alignment with GEOS releases, alignment of PostGIS with PostgreSQL releases, loader/dumper, and Shapefile GUI loader.

Sandro Santilli

Bug fixes and maintenance, ci maintenance, git mirror management, management functions, integration of new GEOS functionality and alignment with GEOS releases, topology support, and raster framework and low level API functions.

1.2. Core Contributors Present

Nicklas Avén

Distance function enhancements (including 3D distance and relationship functions) and additions, Tiny WKB (TWKB) output format and general user support

Loïc Bartoletti

SFCGAL enhancements and maintenance and ci support

Dan Baston

Geometry clustering function additions, other geometry algorithm enhancements, GEOS enhancements and general user support

Martin Davis

GEOS enhancements and documentation

Björn Harrtell

MapBox Vector Tile, GeoBuf, and Flatgeobuf functions. Gitea testing and GitLab experimentation.

Aliaksandr Kalenik

Geometry Processing, PostgreSQL gist, general bug fixing

1.3. Core Contributors Past

Bborie Park

Prior PSC Member. Raster development, integration with GDAL, raster loader, user support, general bug fixing, testing on various OS (Slackware, Mac, Windows, and more)

Mark Cave-Ayland

Prior PSC Member. Coordinated bug fixing and maintenance effort, spatial index selectivity and binding, loader/dumper, and Shapefile GUI Loader, integration of new and new function enhancements.

Jorge Arévalo

Raster development, GDAL driver support, loader

Olivier Courtin

(Emeritus) Input/output XML (KML,GML)/GeoJSON functions, 3D support and bug fixes.

Chris Hodgson

Prior PSC Member. General development, site and buildbot maintenance, OSGeo incubation management

Mateusz Loskot

CMake support for PostGIS, built original raster loader in python and low level raster API functions

Kevin Neufeld

Prior PSC Member. Documentation and documentation support tools, buildbot maintenance, advanced user support on PostGIS newsgroup, and PostGIS maintenance function enhancements.

Dave Blasby

The original developer/Co-founder of PostGIS. Dave wrote the server side objects, index bindings, and many of the server side analytical functions.

Jeff Lounsbury

Original development of the Shapefile loader/dumper.

Mark Leslie

Ongoing maintenance and development of core functions. Enhanced curve support. Shapefile GUI loader.

Pierre Racine

Architect of PostGIS raster implementation. Raster overall architecture, prototyping, programming support

David Zwarg

Raster development (mostly map algebra analytic functions)

1.4. Other Contributors

Individual Contributors

Alex Bodnaru Gino Lucrezi Maxime Guillaud
Alex Mayrhofer Greg Troxel Maxime van Noppen
Andrea Peri Guillaume Lelarge Maxime Schoemans
Andreas Forø Tollefsen Giuseppe Broccolo Michael Fuhr
Andreas Neumann Han Wang Mike Toews
Andrew Gierth Hans Lemuet Nathan Wagner
Anne Ghisla Haribabu Kommi Nathaniel Clay
Antoine Bajolet Havard Tveite Nikita Shulga
Arthur Lesuisse IIDA Tetsushi Norman Vine
Artur Zakirov Ingvild Nystuen Patricia Tozer
Barbara Phillipot Jackie Leng Rafal Magda
Ben Jubb James Addison Ralph Mason
Bernhard Reiter James Marca Rémi Cura
Björn Esser Jan Katins Richard Greenwood
Brian Hamlin Jan Tojnar Robert Coup
Bruce Rindahl Jason Smith Roger Crew
Bruno Wolff III Jeff Adams Ron Mayer
Bryce L. Nordgren Jelte Fennema Sam Peters
Carl Anderson Jim Jones Sebastiaan Couwenberg
Charlie Savage Joe Conway Sergei Shoulbakov
Chris Mayo Jonne Savolainen Sergey Fedoseev
Christian Schroeder Jose Carlos Martinez Llari Shinichi Sugiyama
Christoph Berg Jörg Habenicht Shoaib Burq
Christoph Moench-Tegeder Julien Rouhaud Silvio Grosso
Dane Springmeyer Kashif Rasul Stefan Corneliu Petrea
Dapeng Wang Klaus Foerster Steffen Macke
Daryl Herzmann Kris Jurka Stepan Kuzmin
Dave Fuhry Laurenz Albe Stephen Frost
David Garnier Lars Roessiger Steven Ottens
David Skea Leo Hsu Talha Rizwan
David Techer Loic Dachary Teramoto Ikuhiro
Dian M Fay Luca S. Percich Tom Glancy
Dmitry Vasilyev Lucas C. Villa Real Tom van Tilburg
Eduin Carrillo Maria Arias de Reyna Victor Collod
Esteban Zimanyi Marc Ducobu Vincent Bre
Eugene Antimirov Mark Sondheim Vincent Mora
Even Rouault Markus Schaber Vincent Picavet
Florian Weimer Markus Wanner Volf Tomáš
Frank Warmerdam Matt Amos Zuo Chenwei
George Silva Matt Bretl  
Gerald Fenoy Matthias Bay  

Corporate Sponsors

These are corporate entities that have contributed developer time, hosting, or direct monetary funding to the PostGIS project. In alphabetical order:

Crowd Funding Campaigns

Crowd funding campaigns are campaigns we run to get badly wanted features funded that can service a large number of people. Each campaign is specifically focused on a particular feature or set of features. Each sponsor chips in a small fraction of the needed funding and with enough people/organizations contributing, we have the funds to pay for the work that will help many. If you have an idea for a feature you think many others would be willing to co-fund, please post to the PostGIS newsgroup your thoughts and together we can make it happen.

PostGIS 2.0.0 was the first release we tried this strategy. We used PledgeBank and we got two successful campaigns out of it.

postgistopology - 10 plus sponsors each contributed $250 USD to build toTopoGeometry function and beef up topology support in 2.0.0. It happened.

postgis64windows - 20 someodd sponsors each contributed $100 USD to pay for the work needed to work out PostGIS 64-bit issues on windows. It happened.

Important Support Libraries

The GEOS geometry operations library

The GDAL Geospatial Data Abstraction Library used to power much of the raster functionality introduced in PostGIS 2. In kind, improvements needed in GDAL to support PostGIS are contributed back to the GDAL project.

The PROJ cartographic projection library

Last but not least, PostgreSQL, the giant that PostGIS stands on. Much of the speed and flexibility of PostGIS would not be possible without the extensibility, great query planner, GIST index, and plethora of SQL features provided by PostgreSQL.