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You're reading from PostGIS Cookbook Store, organize, manipulate, and analyze spatial data

Product type Paperback

Published in Mar 2018

Publisher

ISBN-13 9781788299329

Length 584 pages

Edition 2nd Edition

Languages

Python

Tools

PostGIS

Concepts

Geospatial Analysis

Authors (6):

Pedro Wightman

Bborie Park

Paolo Corti

Stephen Vincent Mather

Thomas Kraft

Mayra Zurbarán

+2 more

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Table of Contents (14) Chapters

Preface

1. Moving Data In and Out of PostGIS FREE CHAPTER

2. Structures That Work

3. Working with Vector Data – The Basics

4. Working with Vector Data – Advanced Recipes

5. Working with Raster Data

6. Working with pgRouting

7. Into the Nth Dimension

8. PostGIS Programming

9. PostGIS and the Web

10. Maintenance, Optimization, and Performance Tuning

11. Using Desktop Clients

12. Introduction to Location Privacy Protection Mechanisms

13. Other Books You May Enjoy

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Measuring distances

In this recipe, we will check out the PostGIS functions needed for distance measurements (ST_Distance and its variants) and find out how considering the earth's curvature makes a big difference when measuring distances between distant points.

Getting ready

You should import the shapefile representing the cities from the USA that we generated in a previous recipe (the PostGIS table named chp03.cities). In case you haven't done so, download that shapefile from the https://nationalmap.gov/ website at http://dds.cr.usgs.gov/pub/data/nationalatlas/citiesx020_nt00007.tar.gz (this archive is also included in the code bundle available with this book) and import it to PostGIS:

$ ogr2ogr -f PostgreSQL...

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Authors (6)

Corti

Paolo Corti is an environmental engineer with 20 years of experience in the GIS field, currently working as a Geospatial Engineer Fellow at the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University. He is an advocate of open source geospatial technologies and Python, an OSGeo Charter member, and a member of the pycsw and GeoNode Project Steering Committees. He is a coauthor of the first edition of this book and the reviewer for the first and second editions of the Mastering QGIS book by Packt.

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Mayra Zurbarán

Mayra Zurbaran is a Colombian geogeek currently pursuing her PhD in geoprivacy. She has a BS in computer science from Universidad del Norte and is interested in the intersection of ethical location data management, free and open source software, and GIS. She is a Pythonista with a marked preference for the PostgreSQL database. Mayra is a member of the Geomatics and Earth Observation laboratory (GEOlab) at Politecnico di Milano and is also a contributor to the FOSS community.

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Thomas Kraft

Thomas J Kraft is currently a Planning Technician at Cleveland Metroparks after beginning as a GIS intern in 2011. He graduated with Honors from Cleveland State University in 2012, majoring in Environmental Science with an emphasis on GIS. When not in front of a computer, he spends his weekends landscaping and in the outdoors in general.

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Park

Bborie Park has been breaking (and subsequently fixing) computers for most of his life. His primary interests involve developing end-to-end pipelines for spatial datasets. He is an active contributor to the PostGIS project and is a member of the PostGIS Steering Committee. He happily resides with his wife Nicole in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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Pedro Wightman

Pedro M. Wightman is an associate professor at the Systems Engineering Department of Universidad del Norte, Barranquilla, Colombia. With a PhD in computer science from the University of South Florida, he's a researcher in location-based information systems, wireless sensor networks, and virtual and augmented reality, among other fields. Father of two beautiful and smart girls, he's also a rookie writer of short stories, science fiction fan, time travel enthusiast, and is worried about how to survive apocalyptic solar flares.

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Vincent Mather

Stephen Vincent Mather has worked in the geospatial industry for 15 years, having always had a flair for geospatial analyses in general, especially those at the intersection of Geography and Ecology. His work in open-source geospatial databases started 5 years ago with PostGIS and he immediately began using PostGIS as an analytic tool, attempting a range of innovative and sometimes bleeding-edge techniques (although he admittedly prefers the cutting edge).

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