The new PostGIS support for Simple Polygonal Coverages is described and compared to alternatives. Coverage operations including validation, union and simplification are presented showing their ease of use and high performance. Future enhancements including cleaning and overlay are discussed.
Polygonal coverages are a widely-used spatial data model. PostGIS recently added support for Simple Polygonal Coverages, which models coverages using regular spatial tables. This talk describes the model and compares it to other options for representing coverage topology. Coverage operations including validation, union and simplification are described. They are simple to use and provide excellent performance. Potential enhancements are discussed including operations such as coverage cleaning, precision reduction, edge extraction and overlay. A possible extension to support linear networks is also presented.