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


This chapter is dedicated to an emerging issue in the design and implementation of location-based information systems: LBISs. The increasing use of smartphones in all kinds of applications, and their ability to acquire and report users' locations, has been adopted as a core functionality of many service providers. Enabling access to users' accurate locations throughout the day, which gives context to their requests and allows companies to better know their client and provide any relevant personalized services; however, this information can contain much more about the user than just the context of the service they want to access, such as their weekly routine, frequently visited places, groups of people gathered, and so on. These patterns can be obtained from the phone, and then analyzed and used to categorize or profile customers; this information in the wrong hands, however, could be used against individuals.

Even though there is very little [1] to no regulation on how to handle...