Google’s S2, geometry on the sphere, cells and Hilbert curve | Pyevolve

Google's S2, geometry on the sphere, cells and Hilbert curve | Pyevolve

Google's S2 library is a real treasure, not only due to its capabilities for spatial indexing but also because it is a library that was released more than 4 years ago and it didn't get the attention it deserved. The S2 library is used by Google itself on Google Maps, MongoDB engine and also by Foursquare, but you're not going to find any documentation or articles about the library anywhere except for a paper by Foursquare, a Google presentation and the source code comments. You'll also struggle to find bindings for the library, the official repository has missing Swig files for the Python library and thanks to some forks we can have a partial binding for the Python language (I'm going to it use for this post). I heard that Google is actively working on the library right now and we are probably soon going to get more details about it when they release this work, but I decided to share some examples about the library and the reasons why I think that this library is so cool.

Read full article from Google's S2, geometry on the sphere, cells and Hilbert curve | Pyevolve