[gdal-dev] Open source vector geoprocessing libraries?

[Frank Warmerdam]

Jason Roberts wrote:
> Dear geospatial software experts,
> 
>  
> 
> By integrating with GEOS, OGR can perform various spatial operations on 
> individual geometries, such as buffer, intersection, union, and so on. 
> Is there a library that efficiently performs these kinds of operations 
> on entire OGRLayers? For example, this library would have functions that 
> would buffer all of the features in a layer, or intersect all of the 
> features in one layer with all of those in another. Basically, I am 
> looking for an open source technology that replicates the "geoprocessing 
> tools" found in ArcGIS and other GIS packages. These tools traditionally 
> operate on one or more layers as input and produce one or more layers as 
> output.

Jason,

I'd like to see something along this line happen.  I to do it efficiently
it would be necessary to dig into GEOS past the C interface so that
a spatial index on a collection of features can be maintained over time
rather than created and discarded for each pairwise test of two geometries.

I am somewhat hesitant to have this sort of processing go into GDAL/OGR
itself, especially as an extensive set of methods on OGRLayer.  I think
it could be done as a layered processing library without any noticable
loss of performance.

Best regards,
-- 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
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and watch the world go round - Rush    | Geospatial Programmer for Rent