orb

Package orb defines a set of types for working with 2d geo and planar/projected geometric data in Golang. There are a set of sub-packages that use these types to do interesting things. They each provide their own README with extra info.

Interesting features

• Simple types - allow for natural operations using the make, append, len, [s:e] builtins.
• GeoJSON - support as part of the geojson sub-package.
• Mapbox Vector Tile - encoding and decoding as part of the encoding/mvt sub-package.
• Direct to type from DB query results - by scanning WKB data directly into types.
• Rich set of sub-packages - including clipping, simplifying, quadtree and more.

Type definitions

type Point [2]float64
type MultiPoint []Point

type LineString []Point
type MultiLineString []LineString

type Ring LineString
type Polygon []Ring
type MultiPolygon []Polygon

type Collection []Geometry

type Bound struct { Min, Max Point }

Defining the types as slices allows them to be accessed in an idiomatic way using Go's built-in functions such at make, append, len and with slice notation like [s:e]. For example:

ls := make(orb.LineString, 0, 100)
ls = append(ls, orb.Point{1, 1})
point := ls[0]

Shared Geometry interface

All of the base types implement the orb.Geometry interface defined as:

type Geometry interface {
    GeoJSONType() string
    Dimensions() int // e.g. 0d, 1d, 2d
    Bound() Bound
}

This interface is accepted by functions in the sub-packages which then act on the base types correctly. For example:

l := clip.Geometry(bound, geom)

will use the appropriate clipping algorithm depending on if the input is 1d or 2d, e.g. a orb.LineString or a orb.Polygon.

Only a few methods are defined directly on these type, for example Clone, Equal, GeoJSONType. Other operation that depend on geo vs. planar contexts are defined in the respective sub-package. For example:

• Computing the geo distance between two point:

  p1 := orb.Point{-72.796408, -45.407131}
  p2 := orb.Point{-72.688541, -45.384987}
  
  geo.Distance(p1, p2)
  

• Compute the planar area and centroid of a polygon:

  poly := orb.Polygon{...}
  centroid, area := planar.CentroidArea(poly)
  

GeoJSON

The geojson sub-package implements Marshalling and Unmarshalling of GeoJSON data. Features are defined as:

type Feature struct {
    ID         any          `json:"id,omitempty"`
    Type       string       `json:"type"`
    Geometry   orb.Geometry `json:"geometry"`
    Properties Properties   `json:"properties"`
}

// or a generic version with user defined properties type:
type FeatureOf[P] struct {
    ID         any          `json:"id,omitempty"`
    Type       string       `json:"type"`
    Geometry   orb.Geometry `json:"geometry"`
    Properties P            `json:"properties"`
}

Defining the geometry as an orb.Geometry interface along with sub-package functions accepting geometries allows them to work together to create easy to follow code. For example, clipping all the geometries in a collection:

fc, err := geojson.UnmarshalFeatureCollection(data)
for _, f := range fc {
    f.Geometry = clip.Geometry(bound, f.Geometry)
}

An example using generic properties:

type MyProperties struct {
    Name string `json:"name"`
    Age int     `json:"age"`
}

fc := geojson.FeatureCollectionOf[MyProperties]{}
err := json.Unmarshal(rawJSON, &fc)

fc.Features[0].Properties.Name // == "Alice"

The library supports third party "encoding/json" replacements such github.com/json-iterator/go. See the geojson readme for more details.

The types also support BSON so they can be used directly when working with MongoDB.

Mapbox Vector Tiles

The encoding/mvt sub-package implements Marshalling and Unmarshalling MVT data. This package uses sets of geojson.FeatureCollection to define the layers, keyed by the layer name. For example:

collections := map[string]*geojson.FeatureCollection{}

// Convert to a layers object and project to tile coordinates.
layers := mvt.NewLayers(collections)
layers.ProjectToTile(maptile.New(x, y, z))

// In order to be used as source for MapboxGL geometries need to be clipped
// to max allowed extent. (uncomment next line)
// layers.Clip(mvt.MapboxGLDefaultExtentBound)

// Simplify the geometry now that it's in tile coordinate space.
layers.Simplify(simplify.DouglasPeucker(1.0))

// Depending on use-case remove empty geometry, those too small to be
// represented in this tile space.
// In this case lines shorter than 1, and areas smaller than 2.
layers.RemoveEmpty(1.0, 2.0)

// encoding using the Mapbox Vector Tile protobuf encoding.
data, err := mvt.Marshal(layers) // this data is NOT gzipped.

// Sometimes MVT data is stored and transferred gzip compressed. In that case:
data, err := mvt.MarshalGzipped(layers)

Decoding WKB/EWKB from a database query

Geometries are usually returned from databases in WKB or EWKB format. The encoding/ewkb sub-package offers helpers to "scan" the data into the base types directly. For example:

db.Exec(
  "INSERT INTO postgis_table (point_column) VALUES (ST_GeomFromEWKB(?))",
  ewkb.Value(orb.Point{1, 2}, 4326),
)

row := db.QueryRow("SELECT ST_AsBinary(point_column) FROM postgis_table")

var p orb.Point
err := row.Scan(ewkb.Scanner(&p))

For more information see the readme in the encoding/ewkb package.

List of sub-package utilities

• clip - clipping geometry to a bounding box
• encoding/mvt - encoded and decoding from Mapbox Vector Tiles
• encoding/wkb - well-known binary as well as helpers to decode from the database queries
• encoding/ewkb - extended well-known binary format that includes the SRID
• encoding/wkt - well-known text encoding
• geo - algorithms for WGS84 geometry
• geojson - working with geojson and the types in this package
• maptile - working with mercator map tiles and quadkeys
• planar - algorithms for planar geometry
• project - project geometries between geo and planar contexts
• quadtree - quadtree implementation using the types in this package
• resample - resample points in a line string geometry
• simplify - linear geometry simplifications like Douglas-Peucker