Better Know a GeoCommons Feature – SpatiaLite

By admin On December 15, 2009 · 5 Comments

For Colbert fans the “Better Know a District” series is a familiar part of the Colbert Report. Today I’m kicking off my own series “Better Know a GeoCommons Feature.” I’d like you to meet one of our lesser known export formats Spatialite.

For those not familiar with SpatiaLite it is SQLite with spatial function goodness added. GeoCommons exports the geometries from your overlay into Well-known text. To download your Finder overlay as SpatiaLite you can go to a you overlay details page and click the Spatialite Download link or you the URI to access it from the API is http://finder.geocommons.com/overlays/#your_overlay_id#.sqlite. Once downloaded you have functions such as Overlaps(), Touches(), Union() and Buffer().

File Export

Is SpatiaLite a GeoCommons’ feature you’d like to get to know better? Download SpatiaLite from here.

For those not familiar with the “Better Know a District” series here is my favorite episode with Eleanor Holmes Norton.

Tagged with: spatialite • sqlite

5 Responses to Better Know a GeoCommons Feature – SpatiaLite

Steven Citron-Pousty says:

December 15, 2009 at 11:52 pm

Nicely done – the sooner we get broad acceptance of SpatialLite the better – an truly open alternative to shapefiles.

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Abe Usher says:

December 19, 2009 at 3:26 pm

Brilliant!

I’ve been using Spatialite for about nine months and I love it (for all of the reasons I love using SQLite 3 as an embedded database). The ability to do geospatial queries without PostGIS or Oracle Spatial is very handy.

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James Fee GIS Blog » Blog Archive » SpatiaLite is not the Shapefile of the Future says:

September 16, 2010 at 8:02 am

[...] you rarely see it in the real world. Offhand I can only think of the “beta” format that GeoCommons has on their service (and they’ve had beta attached to it for almost a [...]

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Map Tiles to go :: High Earth Orbit says:

October 12, 2010 at 8:46 am

[...] relational data store that provides great access and compression. About a year ago we even added Spatialite support to GeoCommons – so anyone can convert data to a SQLite [...]

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Damon Oehlman says:

November 10, 2010 at 9:09 pm

Wow – great work guys, will definitely be having a look at this in conjuction with the work I am doing on Tile5 + mobile SpatiaLite would appear to be the *perfect* solution.

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