RE: OGC Ottawa TC meeting highlights

• To: "Ron Lake" <rlake@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "Roy Mendelssohn" <Roy.Mendelssohn@xxxxxxxx>, <Ben@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
• Subject: RE: OGC Ottawa TC meeting highlights
• From: "Woolf, A (Andrew)" <A.Woolf@xxxxxxxx>
• Date: Wed, 9 May 2007 08:59:31 +0100

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

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