Hello everyone:
May I please ask what the spatial resolution of point features or the precision of coordinates in GPlates and pygplates? The thing is sometimes when I process polygon features from one application like GPlates or pygplates then go to other GIS applications like GeoPandas or QGIS and vice versa, I will receive error message saying invalid polygon features. The issue often is self-intersecting polygons.
Will someone please give me an advice of how I can resolve this issue?
Many thanks,
It’s usually on the order of a floating-point double precision, which should be plenty high enough (for example, GPML files store 16 significant digits).
GPlates (pyGPlates) can handle self-intersecting polygons. However the Shapefile specification does not allow polygon rings to self-intersect (or intersect each other) - see here. And GPlates/pyGPlates does use GDAL to read/write Shapefiles which could be generating errors on loading (into GPlates/pyGPlates) - if you have any files that generate those errors in GPlates then feel free to send to me.
If it’s causing problems there are probably some tools that can fix self-intersecting polygons such as the Repair Geometry tool in ArcGIS.