| Developer(s) | Refractions Research, Paul Ramsey, Dave Blasby, Kevin Neufeld, Mark Cave-Ayland, Regina Obe, Sandro Santilli, Olivier Courtin, Nicklas Avén, Pierre Racine, Jeff Lounsbury, Chris Hodgson, Jorge Arévalo, Mateusz Loskot, Norman Vine, Carl Anderson, Ralph Mason, Klaus Foerster, Bruno Wolff III, Markus Schaber |
|---|---|
| Initial release | April 19, 2005 |
| Stable release | 1.5.3 / June 25, 2011 |
| Operating system | GNU/Linux, MS-Windows, Mac OS X, POSIX compliant systems |
| Type | Geographic information system |
| License | GPL |
| Website | http://www.postgis.org |
PostGIS (/post'-jis/) is an open source 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 (OGC).
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The first version was released in 2001 by Refractions Research under the GNU General Public License. A stable "1.0" version was released on April 19, 2005, which followed 6 release candidates. In 2006, PostGIS was registered as "implements the specified standard" for "Simple Features for SQL" by the OGC.[1]
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.
PostGIS is registered as "implements the specified standard" for "Simple Features for SQL" by the OGC.[2] PostGIS has not been certified as compliant by the OGC. For the OGC's definition of compliant, see What does "Compliant" mean?.
There are a large number of software products that can use PostGIS as a database backend, including: