= Geometry Cleaning =

Cleaning is fundamentally a difficult problem, because things can be dirty in so many ways. Here's a list of cases that need to be addressed in any geometry cleaning routines.

 * POLYGON rings must not self-touch
   * The classic "bow-tie" polygon would have to be re-written as a "polygon with hole that touches once"
 * POLYGON rings should not have zero area
 * POLYGONs should probably not have zero area
 * POLYGON rings must be properly nested and only touch once
   * POLYGONs with rings that touch along a segment should have the inner ring and zero-width corridor removed
 * LINESTRINGs and POLYGON rings should not have duplicate vertices and probably not have vertices within a tolerance of one another
   * For POLYGONs in a coverage, this will break edge-matching
 * LINESTRINGs and POLYGON rings should probably not have "spikes" or "gores"
   * These elements create two very parallel segments in the feature, which lead to topology failures later on
 * MULTIPOLYGONS are not allowed to have parts that touch
    * Fixing this in generality is hard because it requires dissolving which is itself a topologically sensitive operation
 * POLYGON rings must not cross
    * Again, fixing this is hard because the intent behind crossing rings is difficult to discern.

The potential for breaking edge-matching calls for a further cleaning function, that takes in two geometries and snaps the edges of one to another, within a tolerance.

 * ST_SnapToReference(referencegeometry, geometry, tolerance)

A self-join could be used to run this function on all pairwise possibilities in a table to "complete the cleaning" of a coverage.