Book Image

PostGIS Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Pedro Wightman, Bborie Park, Stephen Vincent Mather, Thomas Kraft, Mayra Zurbarán
Book Image

PostGIS Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Pedro Wightman, Bborie Park, Stephen Vincent Mather, Thomas Kraft, Mayra Zurbarán

Overview of this book

PostGIS is a spatial database that integrates the advanced storage and analysis of vector and raster data, and is remarkably flexible and powerful. PostGIS provides support for geographic objects to the PostgreSQL object-relational database and is currently the most popular open source spatial databases. If you want to explore the complete range of PostGIS techniques and expose related extensions, then this book is for you. This book is a comprehensive guide to PostGIS tools and concepts which are required to manage, manipulate, and analyze spatial data in PostGIS. It covers key spatial data manipulation tasks, explaining not only how each task is performed, but also why. It provides practical guidance allowing you to safely take advantage of the advanced technology in PostGIS in order to simplify your spatial database administration tasks. Furthermore, you will learn to take advantage of basic and advanced vector, raster, and routing approaches along with the concepts of data maintenance, optimization, and performance, and will help you to integrate these into a large ecosystem of desktop and web tools. By the end, you will be armed with all the tools and instructions you need to both manage the spatial database system and make better decisions as your project's requirements evolve.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Introduction


In this chapter, we will explore the 3D capabilities of PostGIS. We will focus on three main categories: how to insert 3D data into PostGIS, how to analyze and perform queries using 3D data, and how to dump 3D data out of PostGIS. This chapter will use 3D point clouds as 3D data, including LiDAR data and those derived from Structure from Motion (SfM) techniques. Additionally, we will build a function that extrudes building footprints to 3D.

It is important to note that for this chapter, we will address the postgreSQL-pointcloud extension; point clouds are usually large data sets of a three dimensional representation of point coordinates in a coordinate system. Point clouds are used to represent surfaces of sensed objects with great accuracy, such as by using geographic LiDAR data. The pointcloud extension will help us store LiDAR data into point cloud objects in our database. Also, this extension adds functions that allow you to transform point cloud objects into geometries and...