It sounds like what you are looking for is a way to turn a set of non-overlapping polygons and turn them into a polygonal coverage (or at least produce the arcs in that coverage).

I don't think there's any easy way of doing this in PostGIS. I'm not sure that Regina's & Kevin's suggestions will produce the non-shared, unique node-to-node arcs that are required.

The usual algorithm for doing this is:
- extract all line segments from each input polygon, labelled with the polygon ID on the appropriate side - merge duplicate segments, also merging the labels (on the appropriate side). To identify duplicate segments and merge them, segments will need to be reoriented so that they are in a consistent direction (and the labels flipped accordingly) - "sew" the resulting set of line segments together to create linestring edges from 3-node to 3-node (e.g. eliminating "non-topologically significant" 2-nodes

You might be able to create some SQL and/or stored proc code to do this - it would be interesting to see how complicated and performant this would be.

Lee Hachadoorian wrote:
I'm looking through the PostGIS reference, and I can't seem to find a way to take a geometry of polygons and turn it into lines. What I'm looking for is something like the ArcGIS Feature to Line geoprocessor, which will create a line shapefile where each feature is an arc representing the boundary between neighboring polygons with a field indicating the ids of the polygon on either side.

Functions like ST_MakeLine require point geometries, and I don't see anything else that seems to be what I'm looking for. Any ideas would be welcome.

Thanks,
Lee Hachadoorian
PhD Student in Geography
Program in Earth & Environmental Sciences
CUNY Graduate Center
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Refractions Research, Inc.
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