Thiiink: Ideas, Imagination, and Innovation in GIS

Continuing on from a post back in January where we talked about a really nice database engine for road warrior development.  The question, when posed to our internal development team, was “what about spatial?” — a very relevant question given the line of work we are in.

So in my travels (this time just meaning a cruise around the web), I stumbled on a really cool set of open source code that extends SQLite with spatial capabilities.  The package is called SpatiaLite (http://www.gaia-gis.it/spatialite/) and offers up the very useful blend of SQLite relational database and GEOS library spatial operations, the result is a lightweight spatial database with built-in spatial operators. 

If you check out the website you’ll also see something else that is fairly exciting  – it’s called VirtualShape and it is a driver for SQLite that enables SQLite databases to access the data held in shapefiles.  Wow!  This might be the closest thing we’ve had to the live spatial operations we could easily perform using Avenue and theme definitions (and if you can remember writing something like [shape].contains(…) then please drop me an email).