Mastering PostGIS

Title Page

Mastering PostGIS

Create, deliver, and consume spatial data using PostGIS

Dominik Mikiewicz

Michal Mackiewicz

Tomasz Nycz

BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI

Copyright

Mastering PostGIS

Copyright © 2017 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

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First published: May 2017

Production reference: 1260517

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

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Birmingham 

B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-78439-164-5

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Credits

About the Authors

Dominik Mikiewicz is a senior GIS consultant and the owner of one-person software shop Cartomatic. When not coding, he spends time with wife and kids, trying to make the little ones enjoy mountain trekking. He is also a long-distance cycling and running enthusiast.

Michal Mackiewicz has been working as a software engineer at GIS Support for five years. His main job is to orchestrate various open source geospatial components and creating application-specific GIS systems. PostgreSQL and PostGIS are among his favorite tools, and are used in almost every project. Apart from developing, he also runs PostGIS training courses. When not at work, he volunteers for OpenStreetMap and a local railway preservation society.

Tomasz Nycz is a geographer and cartographer. He initiated the implementation of GIS in the State Fire Service units in Poland. He works with recognized GIS companies in the emergency management industry. In practice, he uses QGIS and PostGIS. He has been an OpenStreetMap contributor for years. He also develops his scientific interests in the use of new technologies in geomorphology and remote sensing. He is also an avid drone pilot and mountain explorer.

About the Reviewers

Eric Pimpler is the founder and owner of GeoSpatial Training Services (geospatialtraining.com) and has over 20 years of experience in implementing and teaching GIS solutions using Esri, Google Earth/Maps, and open source technology. Currently, he focuses on ArcGIS scripting with Python and the development of custom ArcGIS Server web and mobile applications using JavaScript. He is the author of Programming ArcGIS 10.1 with Python Cookbook.

Eric has a bachelor's degree in Geography from Texas A&M University and a master's degree in Applied Geography with a concentration in GIS from Texas State University.

Prashant Verma started his IT carrier in 2011 as a Java developer at Ericsson working in

the telecoms domain. After a couple of years of Java EE experience, he moved into the big data domain, and has worked on almost all the popular big data technologies, such as Hadoop,

Spark, Flume, Mongo, and Cassandra. He has also played with Scala. Currently, he works with QA Infotech as lead data engineer, working on solving e-Learning problems using analytics and machine learning.

Prashant has also worked on Apache Spark for Java Developers as a technical reviewer.

I want to thank Packt Publishing for giving me the chance to review the book, as well as my employer and my family for their patience while I was busy working on this book.

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Table of Contents

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the example code

Downloading the color images of this book

Errata

Piracy

Questions

Importing Spatial Data

Obtaining test data

Setting up the database

Importing flat data

Importing data using psql

Importing data interactively

Importing data non-interactively

Importing data using pgAdmin

Extracting spatial information from flat data

Importing shape files using shp2pgsql

shp2pgsql in cmd

The shp2pgsql GUI version

Importing vector data using ogr2ogr

Importing GML

Importing MIF and TAB

Importing KML

ogr2ogr GUI (Windows only)

Importing data using GIS clients

Exporting a shapefile to PostGIS using QGIS and SPIT

Exporting shapefile to PostGIS using QGIS and DbManager

Exporting spatial data to PostGIS from Manifold GIS

Importing OpenStreetMap data

Connecting to external data sources with foreign data wrappers

Connecting to SQL Server Spatial

Connecting to WFS service

Loading rasters using raster2pgsql

Importing a single raster

Importing multiple rasters

Importing data with pgrestore

Summary

Spatial Data Analysis

Composing and decomposing geometries

Creating points

Extracting coordinates from points

Composing and decomposing Multi-geometries

Multi-geometry decomposition

Composing and decomposing LineStrings

LineString composition

LineString decomposition

Composing and decomposing polygons

Polygon composition

Polygon decomposition

Spatial measurement

General warning - mind the SRID!

Measuring distances between two geometries

Measuring the length, area, and perimeter of geometries

Line length

Polygon perimeter

Polygon area

Geometry bounding boxes

Accessing bounding boxes

Creating bounding boxes

Using bounding boxes in spatial queries

Geometry simplification

Geometry validation

Simplicity and validity

Testing for simplicity and validity

Checking for validity

Repairing geometry errors

Validity constraint

Intersecting geometries

Nearest feature queries

Summary

Data Processing - Vector Ops

Primer - obtaining and importing OpenStreetMap data

Merging geometries

Merging polygons

Merging MultiLineStrings

Slicing geometries

Splitting a polygon by LineString

Splitting a LineString with another LineString

Extracting a section of LineString

Buffering and offsetting geometries

Offsetting features

Creating convex and concave hulls

Computing centroids, points-on-surface, and points-on-line

Reprojecting geometries

Spatial relationships

Touching

Crossing

Overlapping

Containing

Radius queries

Summary

Data Processing - Raster Ops

Preparing data

Processing and analysis

Analytic and statistical functions

Vector to raster conversion

Raster to vector conversion

Spatial relationship

Metadata

Summary

Exporting Spatial Data

Exporting data using \COPY in psql

Exporting data in psql interactively

Exporting data in psql non-interactively

Exporting data in PgAdmin

Exporting vector data using pgsql2shp

pgsql2sph command line

pgsql2shp gui

Exporting vector data using ogr2ogr

Exporting KML revisited

Exporting SHP

Exporting MapInfo TAB and MIF

Exporting to SQL Server

ogr2ogr GUI

Exporting data using GIS clients

Exporting data using QGIS

Exporting data using Manifold.

Outputting rasters using GDAL

Outputting raster using psql

Exporting data using the PostgreSQL backup functionality

Summary

ETL Using Node.js

Setting up Node.js

Making a simple Node.js hello world in the command line

Making a simple HTTP server

Handshaking with a database using Node.js PgSQL client

Retrieving and processing JSON data

Importing shapefiles revisited

Consuming JSON data

Geocoding address data

Consuming WFS data

Summary

PostGIS – Creating Simple WebGIS Applications

ExtJS says Hello World

Configuring GeoServer web services

Importing test data

Outputting vector data as WMS services in GeoServer

Outputting raster data as WMS services in GeoServer

Outputting vector data as WFS services

Making use of PgRaster in a simple WMS GetMap handler

Consuming WMS

Consuming WMS in ol3

Consuming WMS in Leaflet

Enabling CORS in Jetty

Consuming WFS in ol3

Outputting and consuming GeoJSON

Consuming GeoJSON in ol3

Consuming GeoJSON in Leaflet

Outputting and consuming TopoJSON

Consuming TopoJSON in ol3

Consuming TopoJSON in Leaflet

Implementing a simple CRUD application that demonstrates vector editing via web interfaces

WebGIS CRUD server in Node.js

WebGIS CRUD client

Layer manager

Drawing tools

Analysis tools - buffering

Summary

PostGIS Topology

The conceptual model

The data

Installation

Creating an empty topology

Importing Simple Feature data into topology

Checking the validity of input geometries

Creating a TopoGeometry column and a topology layer

Populating a TopoGeometry column from an existing geometry

Inspecting and validating a topology

Topology validation

Accessing the topology data

Querying topological elements by a point

Locating nodes

Locating edges

Locating faces

Topology editing

Adding new elements

Creating TopoGeometries

Splitting and merging features

Splitting features

Merging features

Updating edge geometry

Topology-aware simplification

Importing sample data

Topology output

GML output

TopoJSON output

Summary

pgRouting

Installing the pgRouting extension

Importing routing data

Importing shapefiles

Importing OSM data using osm2pgrouting

pgRouting algorithms

All pairs shortest path

Shortest path

Shortest path Dijkstra

A-Star (A*)

K-Dijkstra

K-Shortest path

Turn restrictions shortest path (TRSP)

Driving distance

Traveling sales person

Handling one-way edges

Consuming pgRouting functionality in a web app

Summary

Preface

PostGIS is an open source extension of the PostgreSQL object-relational database system that allows GIS objects to be stored and allows querying for information and location services. The aim of this book is to help you master the functionalities offered by PostGIS, from data creation, analysis, and output to ETL and live edits.

The book begins with an overview of the key concepts related to spatial database systems and how it applies to spatial RMDS. You will learn to load different formats into your Postgres instance, investigate the spatial nature of your raster data, and finally export it using built-in functionalities or third-party tools for backup or representational purposes.

Through the course of this book, you will be presented with many examples on how to interact with the database using JavaScript and Node.js. Sample web-based applications interacting with backend PostGIS will also be presented throughout the book, so you can get comfortable with the modern ways of consuming and modifying your spatial data.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Importing Spatial Data, will cover simple import procedures to import data to PgSQL/PostGIS.

Chapter 2, Spatial Data Analysis, looks at vector data analysis, and we'll find our way through a rich function set of PostGIS.

Chapter 3, Data Processing - Vector Ops, discusses the functions available for vector data processing.

Chapter 4, Data Processing - Raster Ops, discusses the functions available for raster data processing.

Chapter 5, Exporting Spatial Data, looks into exporting a dataset from PostGIS to other GIS formats.

Chapter 6, ETL Using Node.js, explains how to perform ETL ops using JavaScript in Node.js.

Chapter 7, PostGIS – Creating Simple WebGIS Applications, focuses on publishing PostGIS data with the usage of web platforms.

Chapter 8, PostGIS Topology, we will discusses different PostGIS Topology types and functions that are used to manage topological objects such as faces, edges, and nodes.

Chapter 9, pgRouting, explains the pgRouting extension and its implementations.

What you need for this book

This book will guide you through the installation of all the tools that you need to follow the examples.

Following is the list of software and the download link to work through this book:

PostgreSQL 9.x (https://www.postgresql.org/download/)

PostGIS 2.x (http://postgis.net/install/)

QGIS 2.x (http://www.qgis.org/en/site/forusers/download.html)

ogr2ogr / gdal (http://ogr2gui.ca/)

Manifold 8 (http://manifold.net/updates/downloads.shtml)

SQL SERVER 2016 (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-server-downloads)

pgAdmin 3 (Should be bundled with PostgreSQL, if not https://www.pgadmin.org/download/)

OL3 (https://openlayers.org/download/)

Leaflet (http://leafletjs.com/download.html)

GeoServer 2.9 + with bundled jetty (http://geoserver.org/)

ExtJs (https://www.sencha.com/products/evaluate/)

Node.js (https://nodejs.org/en/download/)

pgRouting (http://pgrouting.org/download.html)

Who this book is for

If you are a GIS developer or analyst who wants to master PostGIS to build efficient, scalable GIS applications, this book is for you. If you want to conduct advanced analysis of spatial data, this book will also help you. The book assumes that you have a working installation of PostGIS in place, and have working experience with PostgreSQL.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: The next lines of code read the link and assign it to the BeautifulSoup function.

A block of code is set as follows:

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: In order to download new modules, we will go to Files | Settings | Project Name | Project Interpreter.

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tips and tricks appear like this.

Reader feedback

Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book-what you liked or disliked. Reader feedback is important for us as it helps us develop titles that you will really get the most out of.

To send us general feedback, simply e-mail feedback@packtpub.com, and mention the book's title in the subject of your message.

If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide at www.packtpub.com/authors.

Customer support

Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.

Downloading the example code

You can download the example code files for this book from your account at http://www.packtpub.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit http://www.packtpub.com/support and register to have the files e-mailed directly to you.

You can download the code files by following these steps:

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The code bundle for the book is also hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Mastering-Postgis. We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

Downloading the color images of this book

We also provide you with a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. The color images will help you better understand the changes in the output. You can download this file from https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/MasteringPostgis_ColorImages.pdf.

Errata

Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you find a mistake in one of our books-maybe a mistake in the text or the code-we would be grateful if you could report