Spatial4J

[David Lotts <dl...@gmail.com>]

I recently came across Spatial4J.  I wanted to let Rya folks know about it,
and see if anyone has experience with it, especial in regard to using it as
alternative to JTS/GeoTools libraries and relationship to GeoMesa.

It is a spatial / geospatial library with an Apache license that is used by
the Apache Lucene project.
It seems to have a lot of what I need for doing filter functions in SPARQL.

Also of special interest to Ryians (Ryamancers? Ryaphiles?) is that
Spatial4J is used by the latest version of RDF4J (AKA OpenRDF/Seseme).  Rya
heavily depends on RDF4J, but is not yet up to the version that features
Spatial4J.

Because it is ASL licensed, it might make a good alternative to our
dependencies on JTS libraries.  However, there is an "optional" dependency
for JTS for polygons.  I'm wondering if that means that it won't handle
polygons unless the JTS libraries (LGPL) are included.  Perhaps it just a
convenience for people that are already using the JTS geometry classes.
This probably become clear once I get more into the API.

david.