Analytics for the Internet of Things (IoT)

Simplify

Sometimes, the exact detail is not necessary and a simpler version of a geometry object can be used to speed up computations. For our Interstates example, a line that follows a road precisely is probably not necessary for the use case. If the line is approximately close, it will work fine when a 1 km buffer is applied. The reduction in the complexity and size of the object can pay big dividends, especially in a parallelized big data environment. In that environment, the spatial objects could be held in memory on hundreds of nodes, so efficiency improvements can have a large impact.

Shapely provides the simplify method to reduce the size and complexity of a geometry object while retaining much of the original shape. The tolerance ...