Geospatial indexing, or Geocoding, is the method of indexing latitude-longitude pairs to small subdivisions of geographical area, and it’s a approach that we knowledge scientists typically discover ourselves utilizing when confronted with geospatial knowledge.

Although the primary standard geospatial indexing approach “Geohash” was invented as just lately as 2008, indexing latitude-longitude pairs to manageable subdidivisions of area is hardly a brand new idea. Governments have been breaking apart their land into states, provinces, counties, and postal codes for hundreds of years for all kinds of functions, reminiscent of taking censuses and aggregating votes for elections.

Moderately than utilizing the guide methods utilized by governments, we knowledge scientists use trendy computational methods to execute such spatial subdividing, and we accomplish that for our personal functions: analytics, feature-engineering, granular AB testing by geographic subdivision, indexing geospatial databases, and extra.

Geospatial indexing is a completely developed space of laptop science, and geospatial indexing instruments can carry a number of energy and richness to our fashions and analyses. What makes geospatial indexing methods additional thrilling, is {that a} look underneath their proverbial hoods reveals eclectic amalgams of different mathematical instruments, reminiscent of space-filling curves, map projections, tessellations, and extra!

This publish will discover three of as we speak’s hottest geospatial indexing instruments — the place they arrive from, how they work, what makes them totally different from each other, and how one can get began utilizing them. In chronological order, and from least to biggest complexity, we’ll have a look at:

1. Geohash
2. Google S2
3. Uber H3

It would conclude by evaluating these instruments, and recommending whenever you would possibly wish to use one over one other.

Earlier than getting began, observe that these instruments embody a lot performance past primary geospatial indexing: polygon intersection, polygon containment checks, line containment checks, producing cell-coverings of geographical areas, retrieval of geospatially listed cells’ neighbors, and extra. This publish, nonetheless, focuses strictly on geospatial indexing performance.

Geohash, invented in 2008 by Gustavo Niemeyer, is the earliest created geospatial indexing software [1]. It allows its customers to map…