NIWA's documented use of open-source PostGIS for operational scientific geospatial data in 2006.
On 30 October 2006 NIWA's Brent Wood described using PostGIS on several research systems, including spatial datasets with hundreds of millions of features. His archived technical correspondence demonstrates that open-source spatial database management was part of routine research practice well before the later growth of hosted web-mapping services.
Wood's example records operational use rather than a software procurement announcement. The underlying scientific datasets were multiple and are not identified by the mailing-list exchange, so they should not be assigned invented dataset names or applications.