[postgis-users] How to simplify and complex (i.e. slow) geometry

[Mike Dvorak]

Hi Martin/PostGIS users,

Thanks for your response Martin.  Although I tried your suggestion, I
met some problems.  For one, the documentation for ST_Buffer says that
you *cannot* use ST_Buffer on a collection.  Isn't that exactly what I'm
doing by trying to buffer something from ST_Collect ?  I got an error
when I tried your suggestion (see below):

Here's what I tried:

CREATE TABLE buffered_mask_10( key SERIAL PRIMARY KEY );

SELECT AddGeometryColumn('buffered_mask_10', 'the_geom', 3310,
'POLYGON', 2);

INSERT INTO buffered_mask_10 (the_geom) SELECT
ST_Buffer(Transform(ST_Buffer(ST_Collect(the_geom), 0.0), 3310), 2500)
AS the_geom FROM usgs_bathy_mm5_20_50_200m

Exception in thread "main" org.postgresql.util.PSQLException: ERROR: new
row for relation "buffered_mask_10" violates check constraint
"enforce_geotype_the_geom"

Any more ideas?

Thanks!
-Mike

Martin Davis wrote:
> Mike,
> 
> If I understand your query, it looks like you are running buffer(0) on
> *each* polygon in your query mask.  This is my bad - what I should have
> said was that you need to ST_Collect all your query polys into a single
> MultiPolygon, and then run buffer(0) on that to get your final query
> geometry.  (The MultiPoly you create will be invalid, but buffer()
> doesn't care).
> Actually, I'm told that ST_Union can act as an aggregator itself (when
> given a single argument).  However, I suspect that it is not using an
> efficient method of unioning the polygons.
> 
> Once you have your query polygon, another thing you might try is
> simplifying it using a small tolerance.  This depends on your need for
> accuracy, but it can reduce the number of points (and hence speed things
> up) significantly.
> 
> 
> Mike Dvorak wrote:
>> Thanks for the response Martin.  Unfortunately, that produces about the
>> same results, but maybe I'm misinterpreting your advice.  Here's what I
>> tried most recently:
>>
>> CREATE TABLE buffered_mask_5( key SERIAL PRIMARY KEY );
>>
>> SELECT AddGeometryColumn('buffered_mask_5', 'the_geom', 3310, 'POLYGON',
>> 2);
>>
>> INSERT INTO buffered_mask_5 (the_geom) SELECT
>> ST_Buffer(Transform(ST_Buffer(the_geom, 0.0), 3310), 2500) AS the_geom
>> FROM usgs_bathy_mm5_20_50_200m
>>
>> Any more advice?
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Mike
>>
>>
>> Martin Davis wrote:
>>  
>>> Try using ST_Buffer(mask, 0.0).  That should union all the geometries
>>> into a single (Multi)polygon.
>>>
>>> You could also help us to find some funding to support porting the new
>>> JTS optimized predicates to GEOS  ;^)
>>>
>>> Martin
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Mike Dvorak wrote:
>>>    
>>>> Dear PostGIS users,
>>>>
>>>> First off, I must say that I think the PostGIS project is absolutely
>>>> great.  I've been using PostGIS daily for my research for about 6
>>>> months
>>>> now and have come to love it.  I deal with rather larger geospatial
>>>> databases (as large as 200 GB), so I think I have been really pushing
>>>> PostGIS (and Postgres) to its limits but having mostly success in
>>>> doing so.
>>>>
>>>> Here's my current problem.  I have a complex 2D polygon geometry that
>>>> I'm using as a mask, to limit what areas of wind fields from a weather
>>>> model I insert into my database.  You can find an example mask of the
>>>> "shallow" ocean waters near the San Francisco Bay here:
>>>> http://www.stanford.edu/~dvorak/tmp/how-to-simplify-geom-example.png
>>>>
>>>> The problem is that this 2D polygon, contains a lot of redundancy for a
>>>> mask and it takes forever (i.e. tens of hours) to create the
>>>> intersection of the 2D mask polygon and the grid of model points that I
>>>> want to mask (approximately 200 x 240 points).
>>>>
>>>> I tried using ST_ConvexHull and ST_Union (with the mask for both
>>>> arguments) without luck to simplify this example mask in the URL.  Is
>>>> there a PostGIS function that will get rid of all redundant mask
>>>> objects
>>>> i.e. objects that are completely contained within another object, or do
>>>> I have to program this myself?
>>>>
>>>> Thanks for any advice!
>>>>
>>>> Cheers,
>>>> Mike
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>         
>>
>>   
> 

-- 
==========================================
Mike Dvorak
Atmosphere/Energy PhD student
Dept. of Civil & Environmental Engineering
Stanford University
Phone: (773) 936-8053
==========================================