A triangulation-based approach to automatically repair GIS polygons

Although the validation of a single GIS polygon can be considered as a solved issue, the repair of an invalid polygon has not received much attention and is still in practice a semi-manual and time-consuming task. We investigate in this paper algorithms to automatically repair a single polygon. Automated repair algorithms can be considered as interpreting ambiguous or ill-defined polygons and returning a coherent and clearly defined output (the definition of the international standards in our case). We present a novel approach, based on the use of a constrained triangulation, to automatically repair invalid polygons. Our approach is conceptually simple and easy to implement as it is mostly based on labelling triangles. It is also flexible: it permits us to implement different repair paradigms (we describe two in the paper). We have implemented our algorithms, and we report on experiments made with large real-world polygons that are often used by practitioners in different disciplines. We show that our approach is faster and more scalable than alternative tools.