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"
  • A figure-8 polygon would have to be re-written as a MULTIPOLYGON
  • Sometimes the figure-8 has one really, really small side, and it's best to just lose those
  • Similarly sometimes one half of the bow-tie is really small and should just be dropped
• 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.