Bundling reusable transformation "ergonomics" code in a common package

[m-albert]

It could be useful to bundle code for working with transformations in a common library / package. For interoperability, maintainability, deduplication.

I.e. to do the following (and more) with transformations in memory / within scripts / at runtime:

• Manipulate and summarise:
  • effective transformations are not unique and they can often be represented in different ways, e.g. by
    • expressing a transformation of lower degrees of freedom as one with higher degrees of freedom, e.g. a translation as an affine
    • collapsing sequences of transformations, e.g. a sequence of linear transformations into a single affine
• Visualize:
  • represent graphs of coordinate systems (nodes) and transformations (edges)
• Apply
  • provide and/or document performant transformation implementations
• Estimate/compute:
  • e.g. basic point cloud registrations / estimating transforms from corresponding landmarks

Notes

• SpatialData has much of this implemented which could be outsourced: https://github.com/scverse/spatialdata/tree/main/src/spatialdata/transformations
• Repository from NGFF Zurich hackathons: https://github.com/BioImageTools/ngff-transformations
• Transforms and images bundled in xarray:
  • https://github.com/ianhi/xarray-ome
  • https://github.com/BioImageTools/ngff-transformations/blob/main/notebooks/transformations_demo.ipynb
• Library by @clbarnes: https://github.com/clbarnes/transformnd
• See also the conversations here:
  • Move ngff transformations to separate repo? spatialdata#976

@LucaMarconato @melonora @clbarnes @lorenzocerrone

[clbarnes]

I wrote a python package some time ago for abstracting over coordinate transformations which ticks some boxes at least: https://github.com/clbarnes/transformnd