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

Geocoding using the OSM datasets with trigrams


In this recipe, you will use OpenStreetMap streets' datasets imported in PostGIS to implement a very basic Python class in order to provide geocoding features to the class' consumer. The geocode engine will be based on the implementation of the PostgreSQL trigrams provided by the contrib module of PostgreSQL: pg_trgm.

A trigram is a group of three consecutive characters contained in a string, and it is a very effective way to measure the similarity of two strings by counting the number of trigrams they have in common.

This recipe aims to be a very basic sample to implement some kinds of geocoding functionalities (it will just return one or more points from a street name), but it could be extended to support more advanced features.

Getting ready

  1. For this recipe, make sure you have the latest GDAL, at least version 1.10, as you will use it with the ogr2ogr the OGR OSM driver (http://www.gdal.org/drv_osm.html):
$ ogrinfo --version GDAL 2.1.2, released...