openstreetmap

Paul Ramsey and I recently had a Fireside chat with Path to Cituscon. Checkout the Podcast Why People care about PostGIS and Postgres. There were a surprising number of funny moments and very insightful stuff.

It was a great fireside chat but without the fireplace. We covered the birth and progression of PostGIS for the past 20 years and the trajectory with PostgreSQL. We also learned of Paul's plans to revolutionize PostGIS which was new to me. We covered many other side-line topics, like QGIS whose birth was inspired by PostGIS. We covered pgRouting and mobilitydb which are two other PostgreSQL extension projects that extend PostGIS.

We also managed to fall into the Large Language Model conversation of which Paul and I are on different sides of the fence on.

OpenStreetMap by Jonathan Bennett and published by Packt Publishing is a book that outlines what OpenStreetMap is and how to navigate its various offerings and terminology. Perhaps more importantly, it provides the information you need to become an active contributor to this community mapping project and how to get help beyond what the book offers.

First a brief note about OpenStreetMap. OpenStreetMap is an open source community driven mapping project that comprises data, tools to edit the data, and tiling services and other services to view and reuse the data. It is built on PostgreSQL, our favorite relational database. Unlike other tile services such as Google Maps and Microsoft Bing, the tools and various backup mirrors available allow you to download all the data for your region and setup your own customized tiling service in house. This is actually the main reason we are interested in using it. Many of our clients have networks where because of firewalls, portability, general security concerns, need for further zoom in options for their area of interest, or just need to hide/add more layers to the tiles than what OpenStreetMap or other tile services provide out of the box, they need to be in control of the whole process.