BostonGIS

FOSS4GNA 2025: Summary

nospam@example.com (Regina Obe) — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 18:37:00 -0500

Free and Open Source for Geospatial North America (FOSS4GNA) 2025 was running November 3-5th 2025 and I think it was one of the better FOSS4GNAs we've had. I was on the programming and workshop committees and we were worried with the government shutdown that things could go badly since we started getting people withdrawing their talks and workshops very close to curtain time. Despite our attendance being lower than prior years, it felt crowded enough and on the bright side, people weren't fighting for chairs to sit even in the most crowded talks. The FOSS4G 2025 International happened 2 weeks after, in Auckland, New Zealand, and that I heard had a fairly decent turn-out too.

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The bus factor problem

nospam@example.com (Regina Obe) — Sat, 14 Dec 2024 22:11:00 -0500

One of the biggest problems open source projects face today is the bus factor problem.

I've been thinking a lot about this lately as how it applies to my PostGIS, pgRouting, and OSGeo System Administration (SAC) teams.

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PostGIS Day 2024 Summary

nospam@example.com (Regina Obe) — Sun, 01 Dec 2024 17:59:00 -0500

PostGIS Day yearly conference sponsored by Crunchy Data is my favorite conference of the year because it's the only conference I get to pig out on PostGIS content and meet fellow passionate PostGIS users pushing the envelop of what is possible with PostGIS and by extension PostgreSQL. Sure FOSS4G conferences do have a lot of PostGIS content, but that content is never quite so front and center as it is on PostGIS day conferences. The fact it's virtual means I can attend in pajamas and robe and that the videos come out fairly quickly and is always recorded. In fact the PostGIS Day 2024 videos are available now in case you wanted to see what all the fuss is about.

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PostGIS Day 2023 Summary

nospam@example.com (Regina Obe) — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 21:58:00 -0500

PostGIS Day 2023 videos came out recently. PostGIS Day conference is always my favorite conference of the year because you get to see what people are doing all over the world, and it always has many many new tricks for using PostgreSQL and PostGIS family of extensions you had never thought of. Most importantly it's virtual, which makes it much easier for people to fit in their schedules than an on site conference. We really need more virtual conferences in the PostgreSQL community. Many many thanks to Crunchy Data for putting this together again, in particular to Elizabeth Christensen who did the hard behind the scenes work of corraling all the presenters and stepping in to give a talk herself, and my PostGIS partner in development Paul Ramsey who did the MC'ing probably with very little sleep, but still managed to be very energetic. Check out Elizabeth's summary of the event. Many of her highlights would have been mine too, so I'm going to skip those.

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Why People care about PostGIS and Postgres and FOSS4GNA

nospam@example.com (Regina Obe) — Sat, 09 Sep 2023 23:22:00 -0400

Paul Ramsey and I recently had a Fireside chat with Path to Cituscon. Checkout the Podcast Why People care about PostGIS and Postgres. There were a surprising number of funny moments and very insightful stuff.

It was a great fireside chat but without the fireplace. We covered the birth and progression of PostGIS for the past 20 years and the trajectory with PostgreSQL. We also learned of Paul's plans to revolutionize PostGIS which was new to me. We covered many other side-line topics, like QGIS whose birth was inspired by PostGIS. We covered pgRouting and mobilitydb which are two other PostgreSQL extension projects that extend PostGIS.

We also managed to fall into the Large Language Model conversation of which Paul and I are on different sides of the fence on.

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PostGIS Bundle 3.3.3 for Windows with MobilityDB

nospam@example.com (Regina Obe) — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 20:34:00 -0400

I recently released PostGIS 3.3.3. bundle for Windows which is available on application stackbuilder and OSGeo download site for PostgreSQL 11 - 15. If you are running PostgreSQL 12 or above, you get an additional bonus extension MobilityDB which is an extension that leverages PostGIS geometry and geography types and introduces several more spatial-temporal types and functions specifically targeted for managing objects in motion.

What kind of management, think of getting the average speed a train is moving at a segment in time or collisions in time, without any long SQL code. Just use a function on the trip path, and viola. Think about storing GPS data very compactly in a singe row /column with time and being able to ask very complex questions with very little SQL. True PostGIS can do some of this using geometry with Measure (geometryM) geometry types, but you have to deal with that craziness of converting M back to timestamps, which mobilitydb temporal types automatically encode as true PostgreSQL timestamp types.

Anita Graser, of QGIS and Moving Pandas fame, has written several posts about it such as: Visualizing Trajectories with QGIS and mobilitydb and Detecting close encounters using MobilityDB 1.0.

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