geointel/adr/ADR-002-postgis-choice.md

ADR-002 — PostGIS as Spatial Source of Truth

Status

Accepted for V1.

Context

GeoIntel stores areas, datasets, AI detections, segmentations, QA geometries, and exports. Spatial operations need to be queryable and persistent.

Decision

Use PostgreSQL with PostGIS as the canonical database for:

• project areas,
• dataset spatial bounds,
• vector features,
• detection polygons/boxes,
• segmentation polygons,
• QA/QC geometries,
• spatial metadata,
• analysis outputs.

Raw rasters, tiles, masks, and large binary artifacts stay on disk/object storage. PostGIS stores metadata and vectorized results.

Consequences

The backend can do spatial filtering, intersections, bounding-box queries, and QA matching without reloading every file. The portfolio visibly demonstrates professional GIS database skills.

Non-goals

Do not store full large rasters as database blobs in V1.