[GSP-9] Feature Request: Geospatial Query Support

[matthewnanas]

Overview
I previously inquired regarding the support of Tableland's support for geospatial operations. However according to a response in the discord developer channel, Tableland currently does not support geometry/geospatial-related queries.

Potential Action/Solution
Introducing a few open geospatial consortium methods (ex. STIntersects) to Tableland would (in my opinion) be the best step forward to see if using Tableland in a geospatial workflow is possible.

Alternative
Using a traditional SQL Server is possible however not ideal if one desires to have a completely decentralized workflow.

_GSP-9

[dtbuchholz]

For reference, some of the operations noted in the Discord comment include the following:

• STIntersects
• STTouches
• STCrosses
• STWithin
• STContains
• STOverlaps
• STBuffer
• STConvexHull
• STIntersection
• STUnion

[sanderpick]

This is pretty interesting. We'll have to investigate if https://www.gaia-gis.it/fossil/libspatialite/index uses floats and if so, if we can work around that.

@brunocalza @avichal this could be something to think about for next season.

[carsonfarmer]

I think spatialite is roughly based around the simple features specification... which does use floating point values. Additionally, I think spatialite actually uses geos (c++ geometry library) under the hood. That means it'd be really hard to support this, because geos uses double-precision floating-point values (i.e., double in C/C++) to represent and manipulate geometric coordinates and perform geometric calculations under the hood.