Hi Regina,
It might not really fit the book, because it's not exactly GIS, but our
PostGIS use case is certainly an interesting one as well: As a software
engineer at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, I work on a
collaborative neuron reconstruction and analysis software called CATMAID
[1] [2] (screenshot: [3]), which is used for neuroscience research. We
use PostGIS to represent neurons in a 3D space. They consist of 3D
points that reference their parent nodes or are the root [=soma of
neuron] if they have no parent). Together with synapses, point clouds
and TIN meshes for modeling compartments in a dataset, they model the
spatial aspects of our neuroscience world. Users create those neuron
reconstructions manually in a collaborative fashion plus segmentation
programs can be used as additional data source. Using its spatial
indices, PostGIS helps us to quickly query neurons in a particular field
of view. The space of a single project contains sometimes 100s of
millions of interconnected individual points. We also do bounding box
intersection queries between neurons and compartment meshes, which then
refine in the front-end by doing more precise intersection tests.
This software is used by quite a few research labs and as far as I know
they all do their own hosting with a dedicated server and this is what
we do as well. The reason being mainly that wth larger datasets, we
benefit from machines with a lot of RAM (>256G), fast SSD/NVMe drives
and many CPUs as well as fast local data access for e.g. image data.
Thanks so much for making PostGIS work well in non-GIS contexts too---it
makes my live much easier! Looking forward to the book!
Cheers,
Tom
[1] https://www.catmaid.org
[2] https://github.com/catmaid/CATMAID
[3] https://twitter.com/tomkazimiers/status/1057657843174772737
On Fri, Oct 26, 2018 at 01:05:52PM -0400, Regina Obe wrote:
Hey all. So we've been in talks with our editor about having a 3rd Edition
of PostGIS hopefully to be released around the same time as PostGIS 3.0.
I think they are more or less sold on the idea except they did ask about
current market share and usage.
Part of the reason for that is our previous editions focused a lot on "How
do I use this function or do this weird sounding thing that only GIS people
can make sense of" instead of "How do I do this real world thing"
So one of the thoughts was having our table of contents be more like "How do
I do this with PostGIS" in somewhat laymen terms that most people can relate
to - like Political Districting, Real Estate analysis (walk scores,
elevation measurements to determine viablility of building on a plot of
land)
without scaring people off with "real world things" they can't relate to or
in overly techy terms.
Also since the 2nd Edition (which was in 2015 super ancient now since the
New shiny version at the time was 2.1 and 2.1 is not even supported
anymore).
Other major thing changed is a lot of people are deploying PostGIS on cloud
offerings like Amazon RDS, Microsoft Azure, and Google PostgreSQL for Cloud
so we plan to cover a bit about some things relevant in those that may not
be relevant when deploying on your own server.
That said, if people can respond with what things they are currently using
PostGIS for and also what hosting they are using for PostGIS, that would be
helpful for us to get a better idea of focus points.
It'd be great if you posted on the list, but if you are shy or need your
usage anonymized, you can write directly to me.
Thanks,
Regina
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