I'm working with a postgresql table that contains many rows with a GEOMETRY(Point, 4326). Using the ST_SnapToGrid function and a DISTINCT select, I only extract a subset of rows depending on the displayed map zoom level. I'm having trouble finetuning the ST_SnapToGrid function, as I don't not what unit the size parameter is in?
The size is specified in the same units as the SRID of the geometry.
In the case of SRID 4326 this is decimal degrees. The actual distance
that is of course varies depending on the actual latitude and longitude
of the point in question. If this matters, if might help to work in
some projected coordinates and do the rounding there.
Related
I am trying to figure out a way to convert the result of presto geo spatial function ST_DISTANCE to meters.
If I run the this example query:
SELECT ST_Distance(ST_Point(0.3476, 32.5825),ST_Point(0.0512, 32.4637))
The result I get from Presto is: 0.3193217812802629. The actual distance between these two places is 40,000m.
The presto documentation states that ST_DISTANCE: Returns the 2-dimensional cartesian minimum distance (based on spatial ref) between two geometries in projected units.
What I can understand about spatial ref is at links such as these:
http://webhelp.esri.com/arcgiSDEsktop/9.3/index.cfm?TopicName=Defining_a_spatial_reference
Which leads me to believe I need to figure you what spatial-ref Presto is using.
If I check the prest docs here:
https://github.com/prestodb/presto/blob/master/presto-geospatial/src/main/java/com/facebook/presto/geospatial/GeoFunctions.java
I can guess that is using the ESRI libraries so I assume the ESRI spatial ref? But that is where I get a bit lost as to where to proceed?
Thank you for your help..
I would recommend using Presto’s great_circle_distance() function instead of ST_Distance(). It will interpret your coordinates as WGS84 (aka EPSG:4326), and find the distance between them in kilometres by treating the shape of the earth as a sphere.
ST_Distance() would be appropriate if the coordinate system being used was already projected into a system that used metres or miles or some other unit, but there's no trivial way to do that in Presto.
From looking at the docs, it appears that presto supports a geometry type but not a geography type. That means it's not working with Latitude and Longitude, which is what I assume you're supplying as those point parameters. It's just an arbitrary 2D grid and so the resulting units are in whatever units you supplied as input.
The distance, in meters, between two points which are both approximately 32.5 meters "up" from the origin and about 0.5 meters "left" from the origin (how presto will have interpreted your points) is, indeed, 0.3193217812802629, the value that was returned to you.
How to calculate Altitude from GPS Latitude and Longitude values.What is the exact mathematical equation to solve this problem.
It is possible for a given lat,lon to determine the height of the ground (above sea level, or above Referenz Elipsoid).
But since the earth surface, mountains, etc, do not follow a mathematic formula,
there are Laser scans, performed by Satelites, that measured such a height for e.g every 30 meters.
So there exist files where you can lookup such a height.
This is called a Digital Elevation Modell, or short (DEM)
Read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_elevation_model
Such files are huge, very few application use that approach.
Many just take the altidude value as delivered by the GPS receiver.
You can find some charts with altitude data, like Maptech's. Each pixel has a corresponding lat, long, alt/depth information.
As #AlexWien said these files are huge and most of them must be bought.
If you are interest of using these files I can help you with a C++ code to read them.
You can calculate the geocentric radius, i.e., the radius of the reference Ellipsoid which is used as basis for the GPS altitude. It can be calculated from the the GPS latitude with this formula:
Read more about this at Wikipedia.
I'm having some spatial data that has all of its coordinates as lat/lon pairs (with about 10 digits decimal precision), it's stored in a database as WGS84 data.Some of the data is represented as polygons which are the resulting union of some smaller polygons whose boundaries are stored.Then I'm having a number of points from which I build a linesegments (just 2 points in each segment) which I use later for intersection tests with the polygons.
I'm using a SpatialIndex to improve my queries so I insert the envelopes of all polygons in a tree (tested with both QuadTree and STRtree).Then, I connect two points into a linesegment and I'm using its envelope to query the tree for possible intersections.The problem is that I get pretty much all the polygons as a result which is clearly wrong.. To give you some idea about the real scale of my data, I have about 100 polygons that cover the whole North america, each line covers a very very small part of a single polygon.Ideally, i would expect no more than 2 polygons as a result.
I'm using JTS to do this calculation and I'm aware that it's not really suited for spherical data so can you suggest me another library/tool to achieve the desired behaviour or possible a workaround (for example, projecting before using JTS)?
If you only have north america, just rotate earth by 90 degrees so that Alaska is no longer on the far east. (Fun fact: Alaska is both the most northern, western and eastern state of the U.S.) Then your rectangles should be okay.
There are a number of non-trivial cases though when working with spherical data. Depending on how your data is defined, your polygon borders may actually be bent lines, instead of straight lines. Consider this screenshot of Google Ingress: https://lh4.ggpht.com/S_9jrMqf08JfIbr7DgUDH96rvXMK4wOGtaSKYPGCruXv2HE4oeRuEaQIDIywMgH4198=h900
I read somewhere that the mismatch of the "fog" texture and the green line visible in the left field is due to the two drawing functions using different approximations. One is always a straight line, whereas the other follows the curvature of the earth. If you have a large field (polygon!), the error becomes worse.
"Intersection" becomes a tricky term when your data consists of non-straight lines on the surface of a sphere, unfortunately; and a "straight" line on the surface of earth will often yield an arctan type curve in latlon coordinates.
Projections: these can help, but mostly when your data is local. UTM projections are pretty good, but you need at least 9 UTM zones to cover north america without Alaska. As long as your data is within one UTM zone, projecting the data into this zone and then working with 2D euclidean space should work good. But if it gets lager than this, you may need to stitch different projections, and that is really messy, too.
I create a polygon where each x/y point is WGS84 format
lat/long values.
The polygons are good approximations to circles and sectors of
radius R (each circumference/arc point is a projected lat/long
value of distance R from a centre/apex coordinate - which I have
verified is correct by computing the Haversine distance between
the edge and reference points and getting a value of R back) .
I use GEOSSetSRID(4326) to indicate the coords are WGS84 format.
GEOSGetSRID() confirms the SRID is set.
Use of GEOSArea then gives a value not even remotely close to
the expected value.
I do not see what else I can programmatically do.
If I set the points in cartesian format, and then set the SRID to
4326, will GEOS implicitly convert the polygon points to WGS84 ??
Is the basic GEOS C API incapable of doing the above ??
Dos SRID have no meaning to the API at all ??
Any info/pointers to correct usage/solutions would be much appreciated.
TIA.
The distance that is given is something like degrees between the two points. In actuality, the GEOS API (at least the C++ interface) is units agnostic; the units it gives the distance in is based on whatever you passed in.
In general, multiplying the result you get by 111000 gives you a fairly accurate measurement in meters. For area, you have to do 111000^2.
as topic, the Coordinates value (Latitude and Longitude) is known , these Coordinates will compose as polygonal area , my question is how to calculate the area of the polygonal that is base the geography ?
thanks for your help .
First you would need to know whether the curvature of the surface would be significant. If it is a relatively small then you can get a good approximation by projecting the coordinates onto a plane.
Determine units of measure per degree of latitude (eg. meters per degree)
Determine units of meature per degree of longitude at a given latitude (the conversion factor varies as you go North or South)
Convert latitude and longitude pairs to (x,y) pairs in the plane
Use an algorithm to compute area of a polygon. See StackOverflow 451425 or Paul Bourke
If you are calculating a large area then spherical techniques must be used.
If I understand your question correctly - triangulation should help you. Basically you break the polygonal to triangles in such a way that they don't overlap and sum their areas.