[geos-devel] Polygon multiple intersection algorithm?

[Ferdinando Villa]

Good folks,

apologies for tapping into your knowledge without a real GEOS question, but
I can't even seem to express this with enough brevity for a Google search.
There must be a name for an algorithm that creates the maximum set of
non-overlapping shapes based on the intersection of a source shape set. For
example, the intersection of squares A and B is a smaller square C. The
intersection set is A-C, C, and B-C. I need to do the same as efficiently as
possible with an arbitrary number of shapes.

Does this process have a name, and/or a smarter algorithm than the
exponential ones I can think of? It sounds so generally useful that I can't
think it doesn't, but I found no clue. Pardon my ignorance....

Cheers,
ferdinando 

--
Ferdinando Villa, Associate Research Professor, Ecoinformatics
Ecoinformatics Collaboratory, Gund Inst. for Ecol. Economics and Dept. of
Botany
University of Vermont           http://ecoinformatics.uvm.edu