prepair — pronounce 'pee-repair' as in 'polygon repair' — permits us to easily repair "broken" GIS polygons according to the international standard ISO19107 (Geographic information — Spatial schema). Given one input polygon, it automatically repairs it and returns back a valid polygon (actually a MultiPolygon since the input can represent more than one polygon — think of a 'bowtie' for instance).
Automated repair methods can be considered as interpreting ambiguous or ill-defined polygons and giving a coherent and clearly defined output. Examples of errors are: polygon has a dangling edge; polygon is not closed; polygon self-intersects; an inner ring of the polygon is located outside the outer ring; etc.
prepair performs more or less the same as the PostGIS 2.0's function ST_MakeValid(), but is faster, scales better to massive polygons, and predicting its behaviour is simple (so one can guess how polygons will be repaired).
prepair is based on a constrained triangulation (CGAL is used) and GDAL is used to read/write WKT.
It is available under the GPLv3 licence, which allows you to use, copy and modify the software freely. However, if you incorporate prepair in your software, you must distribute the source code of your software, as well as any modifications made to pprepair, under the GPLv3 as well.
Note that prepair is only concerned with single polygons, and if you're interested in validating how different polygons interact with each other (to be precise: to check if they form a planar partition) have a look at our other project pprepair.
Details of how we automatically repair broken polygons, and what results you can expect, are available in this scientific article:
Ledoux, H., Arroyo Ohori, K., and Meijers, M. (2014). A triangulation-based approach to automatically repair GIS polygons. Computers & Geosciences 66:121–131. [DOI] [PDF]
If you use prepair for a scientific project, please cite this article.
prepair is very easy to compile on Mac and Linux using the included CMake file. It should also work on other Unix-like systems and is possible to compile under Windows. To compile prepair, you need to have a recent version of the following three (free) libraries:
On Mac, you can install it using Homebrew:
$ brew install tudelft3d/software/prepair
Once all the dependencies are met, just generate the makefile for your system and compile:
$ cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release .
$ make
You can run prepair from the command-line or through our QGIS plug-in, which you can get from the official QGIS repository.
A WKT or a path to a dataset (geopackage, geojson or shapefile for instance) is read as input, and a WKT or a path to a dataset is given as output:
$ ./prepair -w 'POLYGON((0 0, 0 10, 10 0, 10 10, 0 0))'
MULTIPOLYGON (((0 0,5 5,0 10,0 0)),((5 5,10 0,10 10,5 5)))
$ ./prepair -w 'POLYGON((0 0, 0 10, 10 0, 10 10, 0 0))' -o myfile.gpkg
Writing GPKG file myfile.gpkg...
$ ./prepair -w 'POLYGON((0 0 0, 0 10 5, 10 0 10, 10 10 15, 0 0 0))'
MULTIPOLYGON (((0 0,5 5,0 10,0 0)),((5 5,10 0,10 10,5 5)))
The folder 'data' contains examples of relatively big invalid polygons. These are from the Corine Land Cover 2006 dataset.
A 'bowtie' polygon:
POLYGON((0 0, 0 10, 10 0, 10 10, 0 0))
Square with wrong orientation:
POLYGON((0 0, 0 10, 10 10, 10 0, 0 0))
Inner ring with one edge sharing part of an edge of the outer ring:
POLYGON((0 0, 10 0, 10 10, 0 10, 0 0),(5 2,5 7,10 7, 10 2, 5 2))
Dangling edge:
POLYGON((0 0, 10 0, 15 5, 10 0, 10 10, 0 10, 0 0))
Outer ring not closed:
POLYGON((0 0, 10 0, 10 10, 0 10))
Two adjacent inner rings:
POLYGON((0 0, 10 0, 10 10, 0 10, 0 0), (1 1, 1 8, 3 8, 3 1, 1 1), (3 1, 3 8, 5 8, 5 1, 3 1))
Polygon with an inner ring inside another inner ring:
POLYGON((0 0, 10 0, 10 10, 0 10, 0 0), (2 8, 5 8, 5 2, 2 2, 2 8), (3 3, 4 3, 3 4, 3 3))