Implement the package

[asinghvi17]

TODO:

• Implement utilities to create a download URL for a given dataset
• Download and unzip the shapefile
• Provide the user an option of which package they want the geometries native to (ArchGDAL for large polygons / GeometryBasics for small polygons seem like good choices)
• Cache the shapefiles somehow (DataDeps/RemoteFiles come in handy here)

[TheCedarPrince]

Hey @asinghvi17 , could you explain further what you mean by this bullet:

Provide the user an option of which package they want the geometries native to (ArchGDAL for large polygons / GeometryBasics for small polygons seem like good choices)

I wasn't quite sure what you are thinking.

Also, separately, I think GeometryOps would be nice to use here, but am not quite sure in what way exactly. There is a need for geospatial filtering at some points as well as probably joining shapes together. What do you think might be the best stack for this? I thought GeometryOps would be good but am not 100% sure now.

Thanks!

[asinghvi17]

GeometryOps is slower than LibGEOS for polygon operations on polygons with n_vertices > 100, (but significantly faster for n_vertices < ~60) so depending on what kind of data you are using, you may want to use different packages. In time GeometryOps will be as fast or faster than LibGEOS (that's already in the pipeline) but switching between the two packages is as simple as refactoring LG.* to GO.*.

[asinghvi17]

To be clear, my idea was for an interface like the R package, where you could call a function that returns some form of feature collection, like Shapefile.Table or some future GeoDataFrame.

[TheCedarPrince]

Ah this makes complete sense -- thanks for explaining further @asinghvi17 !