PostGIS Incubation Application Questionnaire

Please provide the name and email address of the principal Project Owner.


 * Jeff Lounsbury 

Please provide the names and emails of co-project owners (if any).

De facto PSC:


 * Regina Obe Paragon
 * Mark Cave-Ayland  Sirius
 * Kevin Neufeld  Refractions
 * Paul Ramsey OpenGeo

Please provide the names, emails and entity affiliation of all official committers.

Current:


 * Olivier Courtin -  - Oslandia
 * Pierre Racine - University Laval
 * Sandro Santilli - Independent
 * Mateusz Loskot -  and - Cadcorp
 * Chris Hodgson - Refractions
 * Mark Leslie - LISASoft
 * Stephen Frost - Noblis
 * Ben Jubb - Refractions
 * Markus Schaber - Logical Tracking & Tracing

Defunct:


 * Jeff Lounsbury
 * Frank Warmerdam
 * Devrim Gunduz
 * Norman Vine
 * Timothy Keitt
 * Norman Barker
 * Ralph Mason

Please describe your Project.

A spatial data extender for the PostgreSQL open source RDBMS. Adds geometry types, indexes and hundreds of functions, allowing for storage, editing and analysis of geospatial data via SQL.

Why is hosting at OSGeo good for your project?

A consistent hosting platform, and affiliation with other members of the OSGeo community will be good from a technical development point-of-view and a community-building point-of-view.

Type of application does this project represent(client, server, standalone, library, etc.):

Server.

Please describe any relationships to other open source projects.

PostGIS is used extensively by other open source projects. Mapserver, Geoserver, gvSIG, QGIS, GRASS, GeoDjango, deegree, and many others. PostGIS depends on the OSGeo library projects: GEOS and Proj4.

Please describe any relationships with commercial companies or products.

PostGIS is owned and supported by Refractions Research. PostGIS is supported by numerous proprietary products, Safe Software's FME, Cadcorp SIS, Manifold, and ESRI's ArcSDE, to name a few.

Which open source license(s) will the source code be released under?

PostGIS has been and will continue to be released under the GPLv2.

Is there already a beta or official release?

Yes, PostGIS 1.4.0 was recently released. PostGIS has been released regularly since 2001.

What is the origin of your project (commercial, experimental, thesis or other higher education, government, or some other source)?

PostGIS was built originally and substantially maintained for most of its life (2001-present) by Refractions Research, but always released and developed as an open source project. Only in the last two years has the majority of maintenance effort moved outside the company.

'''Does the project support open standards? Which ones and to what extent? (OGC, w3c, ect.) Has the software been certified to any standard (CITE for example)? If not, is it the intention of the project owners to seek certification at some point?'''

PostGIS is certified as SFSQL compliant by the OGC at version 1.3. (And has maintained compliance at 1.4, though it is not certified at this time.) PostGIS is now using the ISO SQL/MM draft as a guide for future standards compliance. PostGIS also supports standard serializations, such as GML, KML, SVG, WKB, WKT and GeoJSON.

Is the code free of patents, trademarks, and do you control the copyright?

The code is free of patents and trademarks. Copyright is distributed amongst the various contributors.

How many people actively contribute (code, documentation, other?) to the project at this time?

Approximately a half-dozen.

How many people have commit access to the source code respository?

22

Approximately how many users are currently using this project?

Thousands. Over six months there were: 20K source downloads; 34K windows downloads; 106K web site visits; 68K unique visitors. There are 1770 subscribers to postgis-users and 267 subscribers to postgis-devel.

What type of users does your project attract (government, commercial, hobby, academic research, etc. )?

All.

If you do not intend to host any portion of this project using the OSGeo infrastructure, why should you be considered a member project of the OSGeo Foundation?

We intend to host everything except the web site and the build system with osgeo.org in the near future.

Does the project include an automated build and test?

Yes, but that has been and will continue to be hosted at Refractions in the near term.

'''What language(s) are used in this project? (C/Java/perl/etc)'''

C / SQL / Java

What is the dominant written language (i.e. English, French, Spanish, German, etc) of the core developers?

English

'''What is the (estimated) size of a full release of this project? How many users do you expect to download the project when it is released?'''

Source tar file is about 5MB in size. Windows downloads are handled via the PgSQL infrastructure. About 3K source downloads a month on average, perhaps 5-10K source downloads a month during a release.