I can't really comment on Spatial4J directly, not having used it or
reviewed the API and code in depth. However, I can say that geodetic
functionality seems like the next major direction for JTS to move in.
(David, I think we've had some interaction about this in the past). And
circular geometries seem like an obvious next step in the direction of
supporting non-linear geometric types.
It's hard to advise on whether to fold Spatial4J into Lucene or whether to
keep it separate. This will mostly depend on your team's ability to keep
running a separate project, I think. Certainly the functionality per se
seems like it might be useful outside of Lucene.
Another question that could be asked is why not add the Spatial4J
functionality into JTS? There's a lot of management questions that would
need be be resolved, but from a purely functional point of view this seems
interesting.
Martin
On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 4:06 PM, Smiley, David W. <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hello JTS list,
>
> I'm writing to solicit the opinions of the folks on the JTS list on the
> direction I should take with Spatial4j — a ~2 year old open-source project
> I run with Ryan McKinley.
> https://github.com/spatial4j/spatial4j
>
> Background:
> Spatial4j came about as a subset of a body of Java spatial code in support
> of spatial information-retrieval for Apache Lucene and Solr. Spatial4j is
> the subset that deals solely with defining shapes, computing distances,
> shape intersection, and parsing and writing shape strings. To my knowledge,
> it is only used by Lucene's new spatial module. Spatial4j is an independent
> part of Lucene spatial for two reasons: Most importantly, it uses (albeit
> optionally) the 3rd party JTS library which is LGPL licensed. The Apache
> Software Foundations forbids a dependency, even an optional one, on LGPL
> licensed software. The second reason is that Spatial4j should be
> independently useful on its own. I don't know of the geodetic shape
> intersection algorithms it has existing in any other open-source software.
> Perhaps I didn't look hard enough but that is to the best of my knowledge.
>
> Some specific features of note to the list here:
> * A circle implementation, both in euclidean 2D mode and geodetic
> surface-of-sphere mode
> * computs intersection cases (disjoint, contains, within, intersects)
> between the shapes it has and points and rectangles (either euclidean 2D or
> geodetic)
> * Rewrites JTS geometries of lat & lon coordinates to support dateline
> crossing. No pole wrap support yet.
> There are extensive randomized tests, by the way.
>
> So there's useful code here for sure, but it's only used by Lucene's
> Spatial module (which I work on a great deal). With JTS about to be
> re-licesned in a way compatible with ASF projects, it is no longer required
> that Spatial4j's code exist outside of Lucene spatial.
>
> I'm thinking of taking one of two paths:
> (A) Merge it into Apache Lucene's spatial module. I'm a committer there.
> Spatial4j as an independent project would be effectively dead but the code
> would live on co-located where it is used. It would always be in sync with
> Lucene (no separate releases).
> (B) Join LocationTech. This approach will only be deemed successful, as
> far as I'm concerned, if "eventually" people start using it.
>
> What do you guys think of Spatial4j and what I should do with it?
>
> ~ David Smiley
>
>
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