What is New in PostGIS Land

This month we we will be giving two mini-tutorials at PgCon East 2010 on Saturday, March 27th. The topic of the talks will be, you guessed it, PostGIS. We have changed our Beyond talk to PostGIS: Adding spatial support to PostgreSQL to a beginner focus instead of an intermediate focus. Topic content will be more or less the same but focused more on people new to spatial database analysis. Our web applications talk will cater more to the web developer trying to integrate PostGIS in their web applications.

Marcus Rouhani of the Federal Aviation Administation will also be talking about the Airport GIS project and migration from Oracle to PostgreSQL.

On a somewhat related note, we also hope to be finished with all the chapters of our upcoming book this month. We just completed the first draft of our Chapter 10: PostgreSQL Add-ons and ancillary tools. After some back and forth with our editor, this will be up on MEAP, available for read and comments for early book buyers. Still two more chapters to finish after that before we get to the polishing of the text, images, layout and final print version.

Our publisher Manning is running a 50% off sale this Friday (tomorrow or is it today) on any MEAP book and they have a lot of interesting ones in the pipeline (including ours).

Waiting for PostGIS 2.0

The OSGEO just completed a recent coding sprint in New York. The New York sprint was a meeting of the minds of OSGEO people from various projects -- PostGIS, Mapserver, Geoserver, OpenLayers, GDAL, and some others were represented. Sadly we were not able to attend this one. A summary of the sprint with a PostGIS bent can be found on Olivier Courtin's New York sprint summary (Original French Version) and Olivier Courtin's New York sprint summary (Google English translation) and Paul's New York sprint summary.

Those in participation on the PostGIS front and diligently working away at new PostGIS 2.0 features were:
Some old faces:

• Olivier Courtin of Oslandia - reorganizing the KML,GML functions and working out the details of polyhedral surfaces suitable for storing 3D buildings and other 3D objects as well as (export features to Collada, X3D etc) needed for CityGML and BIM like efforts. We are particularly excited about polyhedral surface support and generally improved support for 3D in PostGIS 2.0 since we have/had a need for this with one of our current projects. The lack of this feature has meant no compelling reason as of yet to switch this application to a PostgreSQL back-end.
• Paul Ramsey of OpenGeo - working on start of restructure of the way we store geometries and multi-dimensional index support so we can support more types in the core and better support 3D and getting our WKT representation more MM OGC compliant.
• Sandro Santilli AKA strk working remotely by IRC. Mostly working out ST_CleanGeometry robust function for fixing malformed geometries and various other GEOS integrations.

Some new faces

• Jeff Adams of Azavea working on Lat Lon formatter and also improving our CUnit unit testing system.
• David Zwarg also of Azavea working on WKT Raster. Particularly he started work on ST_MapAlgebra.

For those who are interested in knowing what's planned for PostGIS 2.0, you can check out an abbreviated summary PostGIS 2.0 roadmap.