New Additions and Promotions in PostGIS Development Team

This past week our PostGIS Project Steering Committee has gotten a wee bit bigger with the addition of Sandro Santilli and Chris Hodgson. So now we are 5 people strong. Though we have drastically different opinions on things, I think we all have the best interest of PostGIS users in mind such that the difference creates a healthy compromise in perspectives.

Our PostGIS development team has gotten a new addition as well. We have Bborie Park hailing from UC Davis Center for Vectorborne Diseases helping out on the raster front. You might have seen him on the PostgreSQL news groups asking questions. He is currently working on raster image export functions, so that you can do things like ST_AsPNG(rast,...) right from the database. In addition he is also working on raster statistics functions like histograms, mean, minmax, stddev, reclass functions.

Bborie, if you get some of this in for 2.0, I promise to help document these new functions and to write an ASP.NET and PHP application/tutorial that flaunts some of them.

Bborie just committed all these functions to PostGIS code base. I'm starting to add them to the documentation and start testing them now. We'll release a windows experimental build with these in them in the next couple of days. Yee Pee!

Paul Ramsey keynoting at PgCon 2011

As Dan Langille already mentioned in his blog, PGCon 2011 has started. Our very own PostGIS action hero, Paul Ramsey, will be a keynote speaker. He's an introvert, so I have been told, which you probably can't tell by hearing him speak. I'm sure there is an extrovert in there trying to break loose. Anyrate he's one of the best speakers I've come across, so enjoy.

OpenStreetMap tutorial up

We have an OpenStreetMap tutorial up that demonstrates how to load OpenStreetMap (in this case Massachusetts data), into PostgreSQL/PostGIS called Loading OpenStreetMap data into PostGIS: An Almost Idiot's Guide Check it out. The nice thing is that cloudmade provides regional downloads broken out by country/state/ and so forth, so you don't have to download the whole OSM data file if you just need it for your particular region. We hope to follow up that tutorial with one on generating map tiles and using them with OpenLayers.

Part of the reason why we are more interested in OpenStreetMap is it knocks off a lot of tin cans with one stone, and there is nothing I enjoy doing more than knocking down many cans with a single sling shot. Just to name a couple of ways how this helps:

We have a couple of projects planning or interested in exploring use of OpenStreetMap.
It's a good way to test PostgreSQL 9.1 beta and PostGIS 2.0 with something that is not quite so trivial and can be made as heavy as you want it to be by loading more or less geographic regions.
Great dataset for training purposes. I'm not sure why but people seem more engaged in learning when you relate it to topics they are interested in -- like themselves. I personally prefer imaginary things, but I realize I am abnormal.
Eventually I would like to write a pure plpgsql geocoding solution based on OpenStreetMap structure and package it as an extra for PostGIS similar to what we have fo tiger geocoder. That will make it more usuable for non-US. Granted there are a couple of geocoders out there for PostGIS, but none to my knowledge aside from the Tiger Geocoder are pure plpgsql/PostGIS solutions so not quite as easy to install or call directly from PostgreSQL for batch geocoding right in the database.