One of the things I would hope for - maybe THE thing I would hope for - is along the lines of a cookbook. As in, a sample problem is stated, and a solution in PostGIS is developed.

By way of an example: you have a continuous land cover theme (polygons with no spaces between them). You have some habitat polygons, which are not continuous (polygons, spaced apart from others). You want to do the equivalent of an ArcInfo "union" - ie you want a single polygon theme where the land cover attributes and the habitat attributes (which would be null if there was no habitat polygon coincident with that land cover polygon).

(The above has struck me as a difficult PostGIS problem, at least to compute quickly when there are large number of polygons involved. The example given on the PostGIS wiki, using ST_UNION, seems to execute "somewhat" slowly for large datasets).

Some examples of good software oriented cookbooks I have known: the original Adobe Postscript green book; the O'Reilly Python cookbook; the Groovy book I bought recently whose title I can't remember but whose cover has some kind of sporty-looking vehicle on it.

Another thing I think is kind of neat about a cookbook approach - you could canvass this list for recipe ideas.

--
Regards,

Chris Hermansen         mailto:[email protected]
tel+1.604.714.2878 · fax+1.604.733.0631 · mob+1.778.232.0644
Timberline Natural Resource Group · http://www.timberline.ca
401 · 958 West 8th Avenue  · Vancouver BC · Canada · V5Z 1E5

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