I find that somewhat hilarious actually... Like what do GIS people think, we live on a flat earth?
Seriously though, if all you ever want to do is draw 2D maps, I can see optimizing these cases. I can even maybe understand how it's best to nail these features down first... However, it just seems like so many of the tools data models are corrupted by a fundamentally mishandling of 2D vs 3D.
For example, a library I'm using for WKB encoding/decoding pollutes my 3D points with a bunch of functions for dealing with 2D points that I frankly want nothing to do with. Why should I ever want a function on a 3D point to return a 2D point with an optional third member. I can see how this might help you embed a 2D point inside a 3D space, by treating the null value as 0, or filtering it, or some other user defined or standard logic... but if I have a 3D point, why on earth am I casting it to a partially optional 3D point.
That was just an example that's been really bothering me... there's lots of other examples of 2D driven features looking a bit strange in 3D.
Not to mention adding an M dimension, or outside PostGIS, any others. The difficulty with this problem is the immense, vast, epic scale of the issue. I want to say you could probably just define the 3D metric space and then build the 2D one of that, but then why stop there. Perhaps I want a 5D space with distance measured as some similarity metric... is this not starting to sound like a more general problem than GIS?
And another thing! It would be very interesting to think about what aspects of the spacial reference are useful in 3D. I'm still learning about how the SRIDs are used in PostGIS, but this [1] example makes a lot of sense for lat/long references.
Seriously though, if all you ever want to do is draw 2D maps, I can see optimizing these cases. I can even maybe understand how it's best to nail these features down first... However, it just seems like so many of the tools data models are corrupted by a fundamentally mishandling of 2D vs 3D.
For example, a library I'm using for WKB encoding/decoding pollutes my 3D points with a bunch of functions for dealing with 2D points that I frankly want nothing to do with. Why should I ever want a function on a 3D point to return a 2D point with an optional third member. I can see how this might help you embed a 2D point inside a 3D space, by treating the null value as 0, or filtering it, or some other user defined or standard logic... but if I have a 3D point, why on earth am I casting it to a partially optional 3D point.
That was just an example that's been really bothering me... there's lots of other examples of 2D driven features looking a bit strange in 3D.
Not to mention adding an M dimension, or outside PostGIS, any others. The difficulty with this problem is the immense, vast, epic scale of the issue. I want to say you could probably just define the 3D metric space and then build the 2D one of that, but then why stop there. Perhaps I want a 5D space with distance measured as some similarity metric... is this not starting to sound like a more general problem than GIS?
And another thing! It would be very interesting to think about what aspects of the spacial reference are useful in 3D. I'm still learning about how the SRIDs are used in PostGIS, but this [1] example makes a lot of sense for lat/long references.
[1]: http://www.bostongis.com/blog/index.php?/archives/266-geogra...