Mateusz Loskot :: hacking on, working out, living up

PostGIS Raster is four years old

15 Feb 2013 | mloskot

(let’s go sentimental)

On January 27, 2009, Sandro Santilli did the initial import of wktraster code into the spike branch of the PostGIS repository.

The submission followed shortly after Sandro posted to postgis-devel list call for funding for the WKT Raster project. The call had been successful and Sandro secured initial fundings from Steve Cumming (Université Laval), Martin Daly (Cadcorp) and Tyler Erickson (Michigan Tech Research Institute). The project started to roll.

Where the whole idea came form? From Sandro’s WKT Raster project page:

The initial idea and proposal was developed by Pierre Racine for the BAM project of the Laval University, and presented to the PostGIS community on July 2008.

Here is the original PostGIS WKT Raster post sent by Pierre.

On February 17, 2009, I joined the party myself making my first (test) commit r3733 in the spike and, on behalf of Cadcorp (I joined the company in December 2008), I had been working with Sandro and Pierre developing the initial working specification and implementing usable prototype(s). In November 2009, Jorge Arévalo joined the raster team at PostGIS with fresh stream contributions.

In October 2010, Jorge completed the task #587 and moved WKT Raster from spike/wktraster to trunk/raster. The WKT Raster experiment has been reborn as the PostGIS Raster.

In 2011, the team grew stronger and was joined by new developers interested in the raster features: Bborie Park in May and David Zwarg in October. The project has taken the wings and in April 2012, PostGIS Raster was officially released for the very first time with PostGIS 2.0.0.

Today, I was looking at the backlog of changes in specifications of the WKT Raster and the following PostGIS Raster, and I realised that three weeks ago, the project celebrated its fourth birthday!

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