In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

There are a lot of NOSQL databases around today, but if you want to do some geospatial stuff, the latest release of MongoDB may be a good option.

One of the new features is the ability to store GeoJSON, so besides point data you also can store lines and polygons.

From MongoDB.org: Geo Capabilities: MongoDB 2.4 introduces GeoJSON support, a more accurate spherical model and enhanced search including polygon intersection. Currently 2dsphere supports the Point, LineString and Polygon GeoJSON shapes.

Other key features are:

• Hash-based Sharding
• Capped Arrays
• Text Search (Beta)
• Geospatial Enhancements
• Faster Counts
• Working Set Analyzer
• V8 JavaScript engine
• Security

Full Article

Via Ecostudies I learned that SpatiaLite 4.0.0 has just been released.

Here's the warning and relevant changes related to switching to 4.0: "SpatiaLite Version 4.0.0 introduces several relevant changes; many of these may potentially pose severe cross-version compatibility issues. Accordingly to the above premise, a good comprehension of any related detail will surely allow you to successfully master and resolve any transition issue." A reminder, "SpatiaLite is an open source library intended to extend the SQLite core to support fully fledged Spatial SQL capabilities. SQLite is intrinsically simple and lightweight [...]"

See also this related 2010 discussion (read the comments) on SpatiaLite, the Shapefile of the Future? Of course, we mentioned SpatiaLite several other times.

I was at the 3D GeoInfo 2012 conference last week and I learned about the DB4GeO / DB3D open source geospatial database, which is a Java object-oriented database focusing on 3D data. It supports CityGML, has a RESTful API and has its own WebGL visualization tool.

Since I failed to find much about it on the web other than the GitHub page (it seems the code wasn't synchronized for a while), let me serve you the abstract [pdf] of last week's presentation: "The analysis of complex 3D data is a central task for many problems in the geo- and engineering sciences. Examples are the analysis of natural events such as mass movements and volcano eruptions as well as 3D city planning and the computation of 3D models from point cloud data generated by terrestrial laser scanning for 3D data analysis in various domains. The volume of these data is growing from year to year. However, there is no geo-database management system on the market yet that efficiently supports complex 3D mass data, although prototypical 3D geo-database management systems are ready to support such challenging 3D applications. In this contribution we describe how we reply to these requirements advancing DB4GeO, our 3D/4D geo-database architecture. The system architecture and support for geometric, topological and temporal data are presented in detail. Besides the new spatio-temporal object model, we introduce new ideas and implementations of DB4GeO such as the support of GML data and the new WebGL 3D interface. The latter enables the direct visualization of 3D database query results by a standard web browser without installing additional software. Examples for 3D database queries and their visualizations with the new WebGL interface are demonstrated. Finally, we give an outlook on our future work. Further extensions of DB4GeO and the support for the data management for collaborative subway track planning are discussed."

I'd like to see the differences between PostGIS vs DB4GeO features in regards to 3D geodata. Is DB4GeO more and a playground for researchers?

This is major news: after 26 months of development, the open source geospatial database PostGIS 2.0 has been released. PostGIS is one of the best spatial database system there is. It even has been recently identified as better than Oracle Spatial.

The new features:

• Raster data and raster/vector analysis in the database
• Topological models to handle objects with shared boundaries
• PostgreSQL typmod integration, for an automagical geometry_columns table
• 3D and 4D indexing
• Index-based high performance nearest-neighbour searching
• Many more vector functions including
  • ST_Split
  • ST_Node
  • ST_MakeValid
  • ST_OffsetCurve
  • ST_ConcaveHull
  • ST_AsX3D
  • ST_GeomFromGeoJSON
  • ST_3DDistance
• Integration with the PostgreSQL 9.1 extension system
• Improved commandline shapefile loader/dumper
• Multi-file import support in the shapefile GUI
• Multi-table export support in the shapefile GUI
• A geo-coder optimized for free US Census TIGER (2010) data

I failed to find much information about it, but SpatiaLite, the geospatial version of SQLite, reached version 3.0 about a month ago. Anyone knows where to find release notes? I find also funny that on SpatiaLite homepage, it is clearly stated that spatial is not special! :-) Yes, I'll share a followup to my previous entry on the topic (thanks for your feedback!).

On the SpatiaLite topic, here's a blog entry named Spatialite and Excel on talking terms: "The recent stable version of Spatialite, 3.0, supports linking to and importing Excel spreadsheet tables. Read on to see how it’s done. The developers of spatialite have added a driver for *.xls files (thru the FreeXL library ). You can either link to, or import a single sheet from an Excel file [...]"

Via Kurt, I learned about openBmap.org, a free and open map of wireless communicating objects.

From the website: "openBmap is a free and open map of wireless communicating objects (e.g. cellular antenna, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth). It provides tools to mutualize data, create and access this map.

Help us build a free database! Open source logging applications are available for Android2 phones, WindowsPhone6 and the openmoko freerunner freesmartphone.org phones."

The database currently contains for cellular objects: "169 countries, 578 mobile networks, 34,961 location area codes, 706,606 cells (which 218,727 are trusted)"

The popular open source geospatial database PostGIS gets to version 1.5.2. From the announcement: "Last week the PostgreSQL 9.0 release dropped, bringing built-in replication, hot stand-by backup servers, 64-bit Windows support, the schema-less hstore type and much much more. And this morning, PostGIS 1.5.2 was also released, bringing… support for PostgreSQL 9.0! Also a pile of bug fixes that have been building up over the past six months." Follow the link to see which bugs were squashed.

[this is old news from July and sharing it with our users to make sure they're aware of it] Spatially Adjusted linked in July to a BostonGIS article named "Cross Compare SQL Server 2008 Spatial, PostgreSQL/PostGIS 1.3-1.4, MySQL 5-6". Previous such comparison is over 1.5 years old, see also related stories below.

From the associated blog entry: "A few people have been asking us what are the pros and cons of using SQL Server 2008 Spatial and PostGIS and as a Windows user, why would you still consider using PostGIS. Rather than simply providing some hand-waving saying "well if you just care about displaying data, then use whatever you feel comfortable with, but if you want to do real intensive sophisticated spatial analysis and geometric processing without having to purchase a bunch of expensive software, then PostGIS is probably better for you. Hell why must you think in either or propositions - just use both using the strengths of each.", we have tried really hard to quantify the similarities and differences between the 2 and to boot - we have also added in MySQL."Story imported from the previous Slashgeo.org Slashcode site, user comments have not been migrated. For more information, please read Welcome to the new Slashgeo.org!. Thank you for your understanding.

[this is old news from July and sharing it with our users to make sure they're aware of it] Spatially Adjusted linked in July to a BostonGIS article named "Cross Compare SQL Server 2008 Spatial, PostgreSQL/PostGIS 1.3-1.4, MySQL 5-6". Previous such comparison is over 1.5 years old, see also related stories below.

From the associated blog entry: "A few people have been asking us what are the pros and cons of using SQL Server 2008 Spatial and PostGIS and as a Windows user, why would you still consider using PostGIS. Rather than simply providing some hand-waving saying "well if you just care about displaying data, then use whatever you feel comfortable with, but if you want to do real intensive sophisticated spatial analysis and geometric processing without having to purchase a bunch of expensive software, then PostGIS is probably better for you. Hell why must you think in either or propositions - just use both using the strengths of each.", we have tried really hard to quantify the similarities and differences between the 2 and to boot - we have also added in MySQL."