de9im: DE-9IM utilities

As part of my continuing education about the theory and methods underlying Shapely, GEOS, JTS, and the OGC’s Simple Features specs, I’ve written a small package of utilities for working with DE-9IM matrices and patterns: http://bitbucket.org/sgillies/de9im/. Shapely provides the standard (these are probably my favorite OGC standards) predicates as geometry class methods:

>>> from shapely.wkt import loads
>>> p = loads('POLYGON ((1.0 0.0, 0.0 -1.0, -1.0 0.0, 0.0 1.0, 1.0 0.0))')
>>> q = loads('POLYGON ((3.0 0.0, 2.0 -1.0, 1.0 0.0, 2.0 1.0, 3.0 0.0))')
>>> p.disjoint(q)
False
>>> p.intersects(q)
True
>>> p.touches(q)
True

but what if you wanted to test whether the features touched at exactly one point only? A “side hug”, you might say. Instead of computing the intersection and checking its geometry type, you can use the de9im package to define a DE-9IM matrix pattern and test it against the relation matrix for the two features. The 0 in the pattern below requires that the intersection of the boundaries of the features be a 0-dimensional figure. In other words: a point:

>>> from de9im import pattern
>>> side_hug = pattern('FF*F0****')
>>> im = p.relate(q)
>>> print im
FF2F01212
>>> side_hug.matches(im)
True

One may also use familiarly named patterns:

>>> from de9im.patterns import touches
>>> repr(touches)
"DE-9IM or-pattern: 'FT*******||F**T*****||F***T****'"
>>> touches.matches(im)
True