Re: [boost] Geometry and spatial indexes, my opinion

Subject: Re: [boost] Geometry and spatial indexes, my opinion
From: Federico J. Fernández (federico.fernandez_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-10-08 13:54:55

>
> Wanting to code a simple 3D virtual world, I looked into the recent spatial
> indexes SOC work, which depends on the proposed geometry library.
>
> I have to admit I was fairly disappointed.
> So I'm going to put some critics, some quite harsh maybe, along with some
> ramblings about what I would have liked to have.
> Note that I am no geometry or space indexing expert, so what I say may be
> perfectly silly.
>

[...]

Mathias,

Thanks for your interest in the SpatialIndex GSoC project.

I agree about that the indexes lack a lot of features and they're very
limited (for example, they are only for 2D now).

But remember that this is the work that we have done in a bit more than two
months from the ground up (this time include reading the papers about the
indexes, writing little documentation, writing unit tests, finding data to
test, integrate with the geometry proposal, etc), so it's still has a long
road to be usable (as I say in my email).

Some remarks:

- You are able to find all elements within a certain range, if you mean by
range a box. Or you can use a box and then refine the result filtering out
the elements that are not in your area.

- About "Being able to index arbitrary objects and not just points". You can
insert the envelopes of arbitrary geometries and a pointer to the real
object as the data. Maybe it's not the best interface to do this, but a lot
of libraries (i.e. GEOS) use this approach.

Since GSoC ended I didn't have the time to do much more than minor changes.
I hope having more time in the following weeks/months.

Anyway, your critics are very good and they will be part of my ToDo list
from now on. Of course, any contribution is welcome too.

Thanks again!

--
federico