In the past few weeks I’ve been working on a little project on git hub called GeoTools that you might be interested in if you are into geo spatial stuff.

GeoTools is a set of tools for manipulating geo hashes and geometric shapes in the wgs 84 coordinate system. A geo hash is a representation of a coordinate that interleaves the bit representations of the latitude and longitude and base32 encodes the result. This string representation has a very useful property: nearby coordinates will have the same prefix. As is observed in this blog post: http://blog.notdot.net/2009/11/Damn-Cool-Algorithms-Spatial-indexing-with-Quadtrees-and-Hilbert-Curves, geo hashes effectively encode the path to a leaf in a quad tree.

The algorithms used for implementing the functionality in GeoTools are mostly well known and commonly used in 2D graphics. However, I have not found any comprehensive open sourced implementation for the wgs 84 coordinate system.

Features

• GeoGeometry class with methods that allow you to: - Calculate distance between two coordinates using the haversine algorithm.

• check bounding box containment for a point

• check polygon containment for a point

• get the center for a polygon

• get bounding box for a polygon

• convert circle to a polygon

• create a polygon from a point cloud

• translate a wgs84 coordinate by x & y meters along the latitude and longitude

• GeoHashUtils class with methods that allow you to:

• check containment of a point in a geohash

• find out the boundingbox of a geohash

• find out neighboring geohashes east, west, south, or north of a geohash

• get the 32 sub geo hashes for a geohash, or the north/south halves, or the NE, NW, SE, SW quarters.

• convert geo hash to a BitSet and a BitSet to a geo hash

• cover lines, paths, polygons, or circles with geo hashes

I’ve deliberately kept the design simple and non object oriented. These classes have no external dependencies and only use the java.util package and java.lang.Math class. Consequently it should be easy to port this functionality to whatever other language. Also, I’ve not attempted to implement Point, Polygon, Path, Circle, or other classes to support this library. The reason for this is very simple: these things are commonly implemented in other frameworks and any attempt from my side to impose my own implementation would conflict with the need of others to reuse their own classes. I think it is somewhat of a design smell that world + dog feels compelled to implement their own Point class.

So instead, a point is represented as a latitude, longitude pair of doubles or as an array of two doubles (like in geo json). Likewise, paths and polygons are represented as arrays of points. A circle is a point and a radius. This should enable anyone to integrate this functionality easily.