[postgis-users] Transform overlapping polygons to non-overlapping?

[Brent Fraser]

To All,

  There doesn't seem to be an obvious answer to the problem given below (aka cleaning polygons, creating planar polygons, etc).  I did see a note on the PostGIS wiki wishlist to "Add a geometry cleaner". There is also a suggestion to convert to linestrings, node, then polygonize (while that may work for a small set of polygons, I've got 1.1 million to clean).  JTS, Geos, etc will likely fail due to the large number of polygons so I'll need a different approach.

  I'm considering writing some code to iterate through my table of polygons, cleaning a small subset at a time.  I think using PostGIS for the geometry storage and spatial query/selection makes sense.  Any suggestions on which API to use?
	GDAL's OGR
	PostgreSQL's libpq
	other?

Thanks!
Brent Fraser

Brent Fraser wrote:
> PostGIS'ers,
> 
>  I've got a table of overlapping polygons.  How can I make it a table of 
> non-overlapping polygons?
> 
> For example, if table "polys2" contains two polygons A1 and B1 which 
> overlap.  I'd like to create table "polys3" with polygons A2, B2, C2, 
> where C2 is the overlap region of A1 and B1, and A2 = A1 - C2, and B2 = 
> B1 - C2.
> 
> Looking at the overlay operations in the JTS doc it looks like doing an 
> Intersection (to get only the overlapping area) then adding the 
> Symmetric Difference (to get the non-overlapping areas) might work.
> 
> Am I on the right track or is there an easier way (since all the 
> polygons are in one table)?
> 
> Thanks!
> Brent Fraser
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