PostGIS

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PostGIS

Developed by	Refractions Research
Latest release	1.3.2 / December 1, 2007
OS	GNU/Linux, MS-Windows, Mac OS X, POSIX compliant systems
Genre	Geographic information system
License	GPL
Website	http://postgis.refractions.net

PostGIS (/post'-jis/) is an open source geographic information system software program that adds support for geographic objects to the PostgreSQL object-relational database. PostGIS follows the Simple Features for SQL specification from the Open Geospatial Consortium. As such, PostGIS includes:

Geometry types for points, linestrings, polygons, multipoints, multilinestrings, multipolygons and geometrycollections.
Spatial predicates for determining the interactions of geometries using the 3x3 Egenhofer matrix.
Spatial operators for determining geospatial measurements like area, distance, length and perimeter.
Spatial operators for determining geospatial set operations, like union, difference, symmetric difference and buffers.
R-tree spatial indexes for high speed spatial querying.
Index selectivity support, to provide high performance query plans for mixed spatial/non-spatial queries.

The PostGIS implementation is based on "light-weight" geometries and indexes optimized to reduce disk and memory footprint. Using light-weight geometries helps servers increase the amount of data migrated up from physical disk storage into RAM, improving query performance substantially.

The first version was released in 2001 by Refractions Research under the GNU General Public License, and development has continued since then actively. In 2006, PostGIS was certified as a compliant Simple Features for SQL database by the Open Geospatial Consortium.

There are a large number of software products that can use PostGIS as a database backend, including: