109 An overview of PostGIS future developments: topology, networks, long transactions and rasters. Concepts, benefits and development state of each topic will be discussed. The PostGIS spatial extension for PostgreSQL is in wide use by the Free and Open Source GIS community, providing a common service for most architectures both in the C or Java worlds. The advantage of using an ORDBMS for storage of features data is a unified access method from a wide range of programming environments. While PostGIS in its current status provides the OGC-defined "Simple Features" model and operations, lack of support for other models or services forces applications developers to implement them in a custom, thus not-reusable, fashion. Future development plans are aimed at filling this gap by providing standard ways to threat more complex models and commonly required services. FOSS4G2006 - Free And Open Source Software for Geoinformatics Session 5 : Development Sandro Santilli strk@refractions.net Sandro Santilli strk@refractions.net <MaKaC.conference.ContributionType object at 0xb36f0aec> Spatial Databases