Polars ST

Polars ST provides spatial operations on Polars DataFrames, Series, and Expressions. Just like Shapely and GeoPandas, it make use of the GEOS library, meaning that its API is mostly identical to theirs.

• Documentation: https://oreilles.github.io/polars-st/

>>> import polars_st as st
>>> gdf = st.GeoDataFrame({
...     "category": ["A", "A", "B"],
...     "geometry": [
...         "POLYGON((0 0, 0 4, 4 2, 0 0))",
...         "POLYGON((4 0, 4 4, 0 2, 4 0))",
...         "POLYGON((0 0, 2 2, 2 0, 0 0))",
...     ],
... })
>>> gdf = gdf.group_by("category").agg(st.intersection_all()).with_columns(area=st.area())
>>> gdf.with_columns(st.to_wkt())
shape: (2, 3)
┌──────────┬─────────────────────────────────────┬──────┐
│ category ┆ geometry                            ┆ area │
│ ---      ┆ ---                                 ┆ ---  │
│ str      ┆ str                                 ┆ f64  │
╞══════════╪═════════════════════════════════════╪══════╡
│ B        ┆ POLYGON ((0 0, 2 2, 2 0, 0 0))      ┆ 2.0  │
│ A        ┆ POLYGON ((4 2, 2 1, 0 2, 2 3, 4 2)) ┆ 4.0  │
└──────────┴─────────────────────────────────────┴──────┘

Installation

Polars ST is published on PyPI so you can install it with your preferred package manager.

pip install polars-st

How it works

Geometries are stored as EWKB in regular Polars Binary columns. EWKB is a extension to the WKB standard popularized by PostGIS, that also stores information about the CRS of each geometry as an integer code called SRID.

For every spatial operations, the WKB will be parsed into a Geometry object so the operation can be done. If the operation result is a geometry, it will then be serialized back to WKB. Because of that round-trip, some operations might turn out to be slower than GeoPandas. In most cases however, the performance penalty will be marginal and you will fully benefit from the parallelization capabilities of Polars.

About GeoPolars

GeoPolars is an very promising tool for manipulating geographic data in Polars based on the GeoArrow specification. It however seems to be quite a long way from being ready and feature-complete, mostly due to Polars lack of support for Arrow Extension Types and subclassing of core datatypes.

polars-st stores geometry as EWKB in regular Binary columns and delegates core functionality to GEOS, which allows it to be ready now, with full support for Z / M coordinates, curved geometry types (CircularString, CurvePolygon, ...) and Series with mixed geometry type and SRIDs.

About Polars

This project is not affiliated with Polars. The design language was deliberately made very close to that of Polars to highlight the fact that this is an exclusive extension to Polars, and as a tribute to the effectiveness of the original design.

About GEOS

In order to save myself (and yourself) from the burden of GEOS version-specific features and bugs, polars-st statically link to GEOS main. This means that all documented features are guaranteed to be available. This also means that this project is LGPL licensed, the same way GEOS is.

License

Copyright (C) 2024 Aurèle Ferotin

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License along with this library; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA