Boost C++ Libraries

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Polygon Concept

Description

The Polygon Concept describes the requirements for a polygon type. All algorithms in Boost.Geometry will check any geometry arguments against the concept requirements.

A polygon is A polygon is a planar surface defined by one exterior boundary and zero or more interior boundaries (OGC Simple Feature Specification).

So the definition of a Boost.Geometry polygon differs a bit from e.g. Wiki, where a polygon does not have holes. A polygon of Boost.Geometry is a polygon with or without holes. (A polygon without holes is a helper geometry within Boost.Geometry, and referred to as a ring.)

Concept Definition

The Polygon Concept is defined as following:

Rules

Besides the Concepts, which are checks on compile-time, there are some other rules that valid polygons must fulfill. This follows the opengeospatial rules (see link above).

The algorithms such as intersection, area, centroid, union, etc. do not check validity. There will be an algorithm is_valid which checks for validity against these rules, at runtime, and which can be called (by the library user) before.

If the input is invalid, the output might be invalid too. For example: if a polygon which should be closed is not closed, the area will be incorrect.

Available Models

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