Now that the data is loaded into a table in the database, we can leverage PostGIS to flatten and get the union of the polygons, so that we have a normalized dataset. The first step in doing so using this approach will be to convert the polygons to linestrings. We can then link those linestrings and convert them back to polygons, representing the union of all the polygon inputs. We will perform the following tasks:
- Convert polygons to linestrings
- Convert linestrings back to polygons
- Find the center points of the resultant polygons
- Use the resultant points to query tabular relationships
To convert polygons to linestrings, we'll need to extract just the portions of the polygons we want using ST_ExteriorRing, convert those parts ...
