Consider integrating different geospatial indexing systems

[JoaoCarabetta]

Super nice work!

I was wondering if the project can be expanded by supporting different geospatial indexing systems such as S2 and geotiles (bing).

I developed a common API to use them that can help support all those indexing systems.

The API more or less follows the H3 python API, so it shouldn't be that complicated to add support to other indexes.

If you fell like it is a good idea, I can open a PR with an experiment.

[DahnJ]

Hi João, that definitely sounds interesting! I like the idea of working towards integrating GeoPandas with the various geospatial indexing systems.

I took a quick look at BabelGrid, which I'm assuming is the API you've mentioned, and I'm quite excited about it.

I'm definitely interested in pursuing this idea further. At the same time, I'm not sure whether this would end up being a part of H3-Pandas, or whether we'd be building a more general library.

The advantage of H3-Pandas is (I hope) that an H3 user feels at home thanks to the familiar API. Could we provide that to all H3, S2, etc. users, especially if we aimed for a unified API? Or would instead a set of accessors (h3, s2, ...) with their own APIs be the better way to go? Those could theoretically use BabelGrid under the hood, simplifying the work for the developers.

I will try to have a closer look at BabelGrid, as well as (at least) S2, to have a more informed opinion on this.

Feel free to open a PR now or at any point later in this discussion.