| 43 | | * Speeding up spatial indexing using PostGIS: !GeoNetwork uses a shapefile to hold spatial extents for searches that contain spatial queries eg. touch, intersect, contains, overlap etc. At present only the CSW service uses the spatial index for these queries, the web search interface uses boxes and !Lucene. The spatial index needs to be maintained when records are added and deleted through import, harvesting, massive delete etc. Unfortunately the shapefile is not efficient for this purpose as the number of records in the catalog goes over 40,000 odd. In particular as the mechanism for deleting extents from the shapefile uses an attribute of the extent and these are not indexable meaning that there is a considerable cost for maintenance operations on the shapefile. To support fast maintenance and search of the spatial index for larger catalogs, it was decided to adopt the PostGIS implementation for the spatial index written for the geocat.ch sandbox by Jessie Eichar and to fall back to using a shapefile when the catalog is not using PostGIS for its database. An option has been added to GAST to allow the user to specify PostGIS as the database (the spatial index table will be built by the create-db-postgis.sql script when the Database->Setup option is used). When !GeoTools 2.6.x is adopted, we will very likely be able to also allow the spatial index in Oracle for those who must use that. |
| | 43 | * Speeding up spatial indexing using PostGIS: !GeoNetwork uses a shapefile to hold spatial extents for searches that contain spatial queries eg. touch, intersect, contains, overlap etc. At present only the CSW service uses the spatial index for these queries, the web search interface uses boxes and ranges in Lucene. The spatial index needs to be maintained when records are added and deleted through import, harvesting, massive delete etc. Unfortunately the shapefile is not efficient for this purpose as the number of records in the catalog goes over 40,000 odd. In particular as the mechanism for deleting extents from the shapefile uses an attribute of the extent and these are not indexable. This means that there is a considerable cost for maintenance operations on the shapefile. To support fast maintenance and search of the spatial index for larger catalogs, it was decided to adopt the PostGIS implementation for the spatial index written for the geocat.ch sandbox by Jessie Eichar and to fall back to using a shapefile when the catalog is not using PostGIS for its database. An option has been added to GAST to allow the user to specify PostGIS as the database (the spatial index table will be built by the create-db-postgis.sql script when the Database->Setup option is used). When !GeoTools 2.6.x is adopted, we will very likely be able to also allow the spatial index in Oracle for those who must use that. |
