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 OpenGIS 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.
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.
MVT support, Bug fixing, Performance and stability improvements, GitHub curation, alignment of PostGIS with PostgreSQL releases
Buildbot Maintenance, Windows production and experimental builds, documentation, alignment of PostGIS with PostgreSQL releases, X3D support, TIGER geocoder support, management functions.
Raster development, integration with GDAL, raster loader, user support, general bug fixing, testing on various OS (Slackware, Mac, Windows, and more)
Index improvements, bug fixing and geometry/geography function improvements, SFCGAL, raster, GitHub curation, and Travis bot maintenance.
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.
Bug fixes and maintenance, buildbot 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.
Raster development, GDAL driver support, loader
Distance function enhancements (including 3D distance and relationship functions) and additions, Tiny WKB (TWKB) output format and general user support
Geometry clustering function additions, other geometry algorithm enhancements, GEOS enhancements and general user support
Input/output XML (KML,GML)/GeoJSON functions, 3D support and bug fixes.
GEOS enhancements and documentation
MapBox Vector Tile and GeoBuf functions. Gogs testing and GitLab experimentation.
CMake support for PostGIS, built original raster loader in python and low level raster API functions
Raster overall architecture, prototyping, programming support
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.
Prior PSC Member. General development, site and buildbot maintenance, OSGeo incubation management
Prior PSC Member. Documentation and documentation support tools, buildbot maintenance, advanced user support on PostGIS newsgroup, and PostGIS maintenance function enhancements.
The original developer/Co-founder of PostGIS. Dave wrote the server side objects, index bindings, and many of the server side analytical functions.
Original development of the Shapefile loader/dumper.
Ongoing maintenance and development of core functions. Enhanced curve support. Shapefile GUI loader.
Raster development (mostly map algebra analytic functions)
| Alex Bodnaru | Gerald Fenoy | Maxime Guillaud |
| Alex Mayrhofer | Gino Lucrezi | Maxime van Noppen |
| Andrea Peri | Greg Troxel | Michael Fuhr |
| Andreas Forø Tollefsen | Guillaume Lelarge | Mike Toews |
| Andreas Neumann | Haribabu Kommi | Nathan Wagner |
| Anne Ghisla | Havard Tveite | Nathaniel Clay |
| Antoine Bajolet | IIDA Tetsushi | Nikita Shulga |
| Artur Zakirov | Ingvild Nystuen | Norman Vine |
| Barbara Phillipot | Jackie Leng | Patricia Tozer |
| Ben Jubb | James Marca | Rafal Magda |
| Bernhard Reiter | Jason Smith | Ralph Mason |
| Björn Esser | Jeff Adams | Rémi Cura |
| Brian Hamlin | Jonne Savolainen | Richard Greenwood |
| Bruce Rindahl | Jose Carlos Martinez Llari | Roger Crew |
| Bruno Wolff III | Jörg Habenicht | Ron Mayer |
| Bryce L. Nordgren | Julien Rouhaud | Sebastiaan Couwenberg |
| Carl Anderson | Kashif Rasul | Sergey Fedoseev |
| Charlie Savage | Klaus Foerster | Shinichi Sugiyama |
| Christoph Berg | Kris Jurka | Shoaib Burq |
| Christoph Moench-Tegeder | Laurenz Albe | Silvio Grosso |
| Dane Springmeyer | Lars Roessiger | Steffen Macke |
| Dave Fuhry | Leo Hsu | Stepan Kuzmin |
| David Garnier | Loic Dachary | Stephen Frost |
| David Skea | Luca S. Percich | Talha Rizwan |
| David Techer | Maria Arias de Reyna | Tom Glancy |
| Dmitry Vasilyev | Marc Ducobu | Tom van Tilburg |
| Eduin Carrillo | Mark Sondheim | Vincent Mora |
| Eugene Antimirov | Markus Schaber | Vincent Picavet |
| Even Rouault | Markus Wanner | Volf Tomáš |
| Frank Warmerdam | Matt Amos | |
| George Silva | Matthias Bay |
These are corporate entities that have contributed developer time, hosting, or direct monetary funding to the PostGIS project. In alphabetical order:
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.
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.