News
Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial Conference 2010
September 6-9, 2010
The international open source GIS conference. The call for papers is now open!
March 11, 2010
The 1.5.1 release of PostGIS is now available. This is a minor release addressing a few issues that have been filed since the 1.5.0 release.
- Fix to allow dumping table with invalid geometries
- Fixes to ST_SetPoint, ST_AddPoint, ST_RemovePoint, ST_AsGML, and ST_Line_Substring
- Fixes for geography features crossing the date line
What is PostGIS?
PostGIS adds support for geographic objects to the PostgreSQL object-relational database. In effect, PostGIS "spatially enables" the PostgreSQL server, allowing it to be used as a backend spatial database for geographic information systems (GIS),
much like ESRI's SDE or Oracle's Spatial extension.
PostGIS follows the OpenGIS "Simple Features Specification for SQL" and has been certified as compliant with the "Types and Functions" profile.
PostGIS has been developed by Refractions Research as a project in open source spatial database technology.
PostGIS is released under the GNU General Public License. We continue to develop PostGIS, and have added user interface tools, basic topology support, data validation, coordinate transformation, programming APIs and much more.
Our list of future projects includes full topology support, raster support, networks and routing, three dimensional surfaces,
curves and splines and other features. Ask us about consulting services and implementing new features.
Case Studies
Learn how PostGIS is being used around the world.
Natural Language Spatial Search Engine for Rental Places &ndash Rento
Rento is a free web service that makes it easy to find a place to rent in Greece. Powered by PostgreSQL and PostGIS, it provides ad listings with photographs displayed on a map. Searching is accomplished through map navigation and natural language processing, with the search engine being capable of answering complex (spatial) questions such as "flat near the University of Athens" or "loft up to 800 euros near a metro station" (in greek).
Institut Géographique National, France
The national mapping agency of France manages over 100 million topographic features in PostGIS/PostgreSQL and provides read/write access to over 100 field researchers around the country.
GlobeXplorer serves terrabytes of imagery to clients around the world using PostGIS as their production database server. In 2004, GlobeXplorer migrated from Informix to PostGIS, and now they are serving over a million requests a day with PostGIS.