pgSphere 1.0 beta1 released

The pgSphere development team is pleased to announce the first beta
release of
the module pgSphere.  pgSphere adds data types to PostgreSQL which support
spherical geometry.  The purpose of pgSphere is to provide uniform access to
spherical data.

pgSphere provides the following functionality:

- input and output of spherical data in several formats (radians,
degrees, etc)
- containing, overlapping and other geometrical operations for different
objects
  on a sphere.
- various input and converting functions and operators
- calculations of circumference and area of an object on a sphere
- spherical transformations
- indexed data access methods for spherical data types.

The following data types are supported:
points, circles, lines, ellipses, coordinate ranges (box), polygons and
paths.

A variety of operators are implemented, including equality, contains,
overlaps,
distance, circumference, center, etc...

A number of functions add support for area, components of coordinates,
transformations, and many more.

Indexing is supported on all data type listed above using GiST and is
used with
the following operators: contains, overlaps, crosses and equal/not equal.
Clustering is also supported using B-tree indexes for optimization purposes.

We want to release version 1.0 as soon as possible, hence testers are
welcome!

pgSphere development home page :
  http://gborg.postgresql.org/project/pgsphere/projdisplay.php

Additional informations :
  http://www.pgastro.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?pgSphere

Janko Richter