Why people care about PostGIS and Postgres with Paul Ramsey & Regina Obe

The geospatial world of Postgres is so much more than mapping. Paul Ramsey and Regina Obe join Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia to explore the "where" on Path To Citus Con*, the podcast for developers who love Postgres. What are some of the unexpected use cases for PostGIS, one of the most popular extensions to Postgres? How have Large Language Models helped in the geospatial world? Can you really model almost anything with pgRouting? “Where” is the universal foreign key. They talk about communities and governments using geospatial data and how it's very difficult to build a database that does not have some sort of spatial component to it. Why do people care about PostGIS? Find out more about OpenStreetMap and its place in the open source geospatial world. Finally, Paul and Regina share the origin story for the PostGIS extension to Postgres.

*[Update: July 2024] Path To Citus Con has been renamed to Talking Postgres. All of the past podcast episodes from Path To Citus Con—now called Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano—can be found here: https://talkingpostgres.com

Links mentioned in this episode, in the order they were covered:

• PostGIS: https://postgis.net/  
• FOSS4G NA: https://foss4gna.org/ 
• Ushahidi: https://www.ushahidi.com/  
• Humanitarian Open Street Map: https://www.hotosm.org/  
• OpenStreetMap: https://www.openstreetmap.org/ 
• pgRouting: https://pgrouting.org/ 
• Regina Obe’s books: https://locatepress.com/book/pgr  
• Regina’s book “PostGIS In Action”: https://www.manning.com/books/postgis-in-action-third-edition?experiment=B 
• MobilityDB: https://github.com/MobilityDB/MobilityDB 
• Blog: Analyzing GPS trajectories at scale with Postgres, PostGIS, MobilityDB, & Citus: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-database-for-postgresql/analyzing-gps-trajectories-at-scale-with-postgres-mobilitydb-amp/ba-p/1859278  
• OSGeo: https://www.osgeo.org/  
• Simon Willison’s presentation on "The weird world of LLMs": https://simonwillison.net/2023/Aug/3/weird-world-of-llms/ 
• QGIS: https://qgis.org/en/site/ 
• QGIS “Gentle Introduction” documentation: https://docs.qgis.org/3.28/en/docs/gentle_gis_introduction/ 
• PostGIS Workshops: https://postgis.net/documentation/training/#workshop 
• Locate Press: https://locatepress.com/ 
• FedGeoDay 2023: https://www.fedgeo.us/about-2023 
• Schedule of FOSS4G NA 2023: https://foss4gna.org/schedule.html#schedule 
• FOSS4G Brazil, December 2024: https://www.osgeo.org/foundation-news/foss4g-2024-has-been-awarded-to-belem-brazil/  
• Paul's keynote talk at PGConfEU in Lisbon in 2018, titled "Put some "where" in your WHERE clause": https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1xyXA4-0wmNX7WfiLeH9h10bIkZxrej278-mMaClagys/edit?usp=sharing