Regina,
Some very good points.
I stopped using the term years ago given that I concentrate on applying spatial
data and functions to solving business problems.
One problem is that the "spatial" industry is dominated by "GIS" vendors and
practitioners: it isn't easy to find new non-GIS work.
In fact, I think this is one of the problems with FOSS4G technologies: they are
marketed and sold as specific toolsets in opposition to the vendor products but
on the same playground.
I have a few examples I can provide you with, just give me a bit of time to
write them up.
As you going to FOSS4G in Melbourne this month?
regards
Simon
On Thu, 01 Nov 2018 10:17:04 +1100, Regina Obe <[email protected]> wrote:
Tom,
That's a pretty nice use case and one I've thought of coming from a
Bioelectronics/Biomechanics educational background.
I think a lot more people would be using PostGIS if they saw it as a tool set of tools
for visualizing and analyzing space, instead of "a toolset for GIS"
The GIS word seems to be a turn-off for a lot of people who have spatial
problems to solve but don't think of themselves as GIS practioners.
I much prefer the term "Spatial" than GIS because it really focuses on what I think makes
PostGIS great - "A tool for analyzing space"
Thanks,
Regina
-----Original Message-----
From: postgis-users [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf
Of Tom Kazimiers
Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2018 3:16 PM
To: PostGIS Users Discussion <[email protected]>
Cc: 'PostGIS Development Discussion' <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [postgis-users] PostGIS case usages
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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Regards
Simon
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