relation to xdggs?

[keewis]

Over the past year, I've been working on xdggs, a package that allow working with discrete global grid systems (DGGS) by making use of the information in the indexing scheme.

As far as I understand it, uxarray works in a similar space (for example see #1028), but instead of using the cell / node / zone ids it makes use of the mesh / cell boundaries.

In opening this discussion I'm particularly interested in figuring out how both libraries relate to each other, how they could interact (e.g. transformation between the two in-memory representations), and in general how we can collaborate better.

cc @allixender

[keewis]

To be more concrete for conversion of the in-memory representations, do you think we could use geoarrow (or shapely) polygon arrays to convert the xr.Dataset object to uxarray? If I read your documentation correctly, we'd have to somehow construct a uxarray.Grid from the polygon arrays and would then be able to use UxDataset.from_xarray.

For the other way around, if the cell ids / grid parameters are already available I think it might be fine to convert to xarray and use the usual xdggs.decode. However, if that's not the case we'd have to figure out the grid parameters (mostly resolution level, but depending on the grid there might be more), and then we'd be able to use the cell centers to reconstruct the cell ids.

Once we've resolved those question I guess we'd also have to figure out where the conversion methods should live. xarray implements the conversion from / to pandas, which pandas calls in the to_xarray methods. Maybe we can do something similar here?

I told @erogluorhan this before, but I would be open to scheduling a separate, dedicated meeting discussing the finer details if you prefer. Otherwise I'd also be fine with continuing this discussion here or on the xdggs repo.