3 April 2012 was a busy day for releases/announcements in the geospatial field:
PostGIS 2.0 – This long-anticipated major version of PostGIS was announced with advanced features such as raster, topology, and 3D/4D indexing. Many have been using 2.0 for a while but the official release gives top-cover to organizations, such as some government agencies, that are not allowed to take systems “production” using software that is technically in beta.
CartoDB v1 – I’ve blogged about CartoDB before and it’s an intriguing platform for hosting geospatial data and applications. It uses PostGIS 2.0 as its storage engine and exposes a lot of PostGIS capability through its API. It’s a pretty elegant way to build interactive mapping applications. It’s support of GeoJSON makes it easy to integrate with a number of mapping libraries
GraffitiMapper – This is a location-based application built by Spatial Networks on their Fulcrum platform. It’s a great example of a specialized crowd-sourcing application. In this case, capturing graffiti using location as a potential indicator of other activity. It also really showcases the flexibility of Fulcrum. The app is currently only available for iOS but rumor has it Android is in the works.
All-in-all, it was pretty exciting day. Congratulations to everyone involved in all of these releases.
Well, my toy box is now overflowing so it’s time to start playing.
