postgis

A Look at “PostGIS In Action”

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Over the past few weeks, I have been reading a copy of the upcoming book by Regina Obe and Leo Hsu titled “PostGIS In Action.” Through my work with zigGIS and some of my consulting work with Zekiah, I have been using PostGIS with good results for some time now. I have found that it matches or exceeds the capabilities of its commercial counterparts and I can be quite productive with it.

Regina has been a frequent contributor to zigGIS discussions over the years and her expertise with PostGIS has definitely helped Abe, Paolo and I as we have worked on it. Also, many tips from the Boston GIS blog/site have been very helpful so I have been looking forward to this book for some time.

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OpenGeo Suite – A Milestone

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On May 28th OpenGeo announced the release of the OpenGeo Suite. They also describe their open pricing structure for support of the suite.

This announcement represents a milestone for open-source geospatial software. If you are of a technical nature and are expecting a detailed discussion of the technical advantages of the OpenGeo Suite, you should probably stop reading now. The OpenGeo Suite is a milestone because it establishes a fair pricing model that addresses what, in my opinion, has been the primary barrier to the adoption of open-source GIS in many enterprises: risk.

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Using PostgreSQL Views in zigGIS 2.0.2

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When we mapped out the way ahead for zigGIS, we knew we wanted to lay the groundwork to add support for SQL Server 2008 and possibly other database platforms. The way zigGIS was originally constructed, it used the PostGIS geometry_columns table to discover available spatial tables. This has worked well but we came to realize that there are numerous workflows that can be employed to create spatial tables in PostGIS and many of these don’t necessarily register in the geometry_columns table. For example, you can use a standard CREATE TABLE to create a table that includes a geometry column. In this case, the table will not be registered but will still be a valid spatial table. The same can be said for views.

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zigGIS 2.0.2 Enhancements Announced

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Abe posted today about upcoming enhancements in zigGIS 2.0.2. These changes address some of the most common feedback that we’ve heard from users. Abe has been working hard to get these changes implemented and released in a timely fashion. Testing will begin shortly. In addition to the flexibility that Abe describes, these changes also begin … Read more

Writing GeoJSON from SharpMap, Part 1

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In between proposals, white papers and the like, I’ve been able to do a little coding to keep myself sane. Recently, I have been playing with SharpMap, GeoJSON and OpenLayers. But not necessarily in that order. Originally, I was looking over the GeoJSON spec to get more of a feel for it and decided that it would be fun (I know) to write an exporter for SharpMap. There is already a converter to write SharpMap geometries as WKT so I went ahead and built another one to convert to GeoJSON. In order to test it, I decided to use OpenLayers.

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Using ArcSDE 9.3 with PostgreSQL, Part 3.5

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I thought I was done with the series a while back but I’ve been getting a steady stream of questions through other channels so I thought I’d wrap up a lot of the common stuff in another post. Most of the inquiries come from people trying to integrate ArcSDE for PostgreSQL with open-source tools in one way or another. Here are a few notes:

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