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

Exporting models as X3D for the web


Entering 3D data in a PostGIS database is not nearly as interesting if we have no capacity for extracting the data back out in some useable form. One way to approach this problem is to leverage the PostGIS ability to write 3D tables to the X3D format.

X3D is an XML standard for displaying 3D data and works well via the web. For those familiar with Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), X3D is the next generation of that.

To view X3D in the browser, a user has the choice of a variety of plugins, or they can leverage JavaScript APIs to enable viewing. We will perform the latter, as it requires no user configuration to work. We will use X3DOM's JavaScript framework to accomplish this. X3DOM is a demonstration of the integration of HTML5 and 3D and uses Web Graphics Library (WebGL); (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGL) to allow rendering and interaction with 3D content in the browser. This means that our data will not get displayed in browsers that are not...