touche!
Too many people forget the case of a feature with (possibly multiple) coverage-valued properties. When
scientific people complain that this ISO/OGC stuff "is just GIS" I robustly respond that actually
the concepts are as revolutionary to traditional GIS as to us scientific users. Let's please leave behind
these old notions of "raster" vs "vector", and realise that actually we can model the
world in whatever complex way is necessary.
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-galeon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:owner-galeon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Ron Lake
Sent: 08 May 2007 16:59
To: Roy Mendelssohn; Ben@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: Unidata GALEON
Subject: RE: OGC Ottawa TC meeting highlights
Hi Roy:
I think the idea of a feature "varying over one of its
coordinate axes"
is at best vague - since a feature in almost all cases does
not have a distinguished frame of reference (for the
coordinate axes). If you wish to think in this fashion, I
think it would be better to think in terms of a feature which
has a property (or properties) whose value is a
distributed over the extent of the feature. Consider for example a
road and its surface type. One might have a single property
of the road
- surface that takes the values (paved, gravel, dirt) - and
there is only one such property for the entire road. At the
other end of the spectrum one might have a surface property
whose value is a function giving the distribution of the
surface type as a function of distance along the road. This
distribution is a coverage and the value (in this
case) of the surface property.
Cheers
Ron
