2026-09-02 –, Conference Management Room2
What actually constitutes a valid polygon is a question that various stakeholders have very different views on – and even open-source libraries like GEOS and S2 are far from a consensus. This talk explores practical problems at the crossroads of coffee industry, geodata, and EU regulation.
One would believe it to be quite straightforward: The user uploads their geodata, it is processed, and then gets passed on. However, what actually constitutes a valid polygon is a question that various stakeholders (from farmers to engineers to authorities) have very different views on – and even open-source libraries are far from a consensus.
This technical yet light-hearted talk illustrates the wide range of pitfalls and how to overcome them, exploring practical examples from the crossroads of the worldwide coffee industry, user-supplied geodata, standardised file formats, interconnecting systems, and well-intended EU regulation.
On the technical side, it will especially focus on the differing behaviour of GEOS vs S2 and hence applications and frameworks that use these libraries, like Python's Shapely or R's sf. It will also touch on the use of GeoJSON by authoritative regulators.
GEOS, S2, Shapely, sf, GeoJSON
I make my conference contribution available under the CC BY 4.0 license. The conference contribution comprises the abstract, the text contribution for the conference proceedings, the presentation materials as well as the video recording and live transmission of the presentation:
I studied (Geo-) Informatics at the University of Münster, accompanied with employment in the openEO project as well as internships at 52°North and GEOLYTIX in London. After spending two years at the DLR-affiliated Earth Observation Research Cluster in Würzburg, I am now working as a Geospatial Data Engineer at GRAS Global Risk Assessment Services, focusing on Earth-Observation-based solutions to enable sustainability efforts in practice.