[Geojson] Requests for comments on GeoJSON Events draft

[Sean Gillies <[e-mail]>]

Hi and Bonne Année all,

With help from many of you, I've been working on a GeoJSON extension for
event-like features

    https://github.com/sgillies/geojson-events

and have drafted a spec:


https://sgillies.github.io/geojson-events/draft-gillies-geojson-events.html
    https://sgillies.github.io/geojson-events/

It's pared down dramatically from what we discussed in the past. Fuzzy time
periods are out and so are temporal bounding boxes because the use cases
for these are rare. GeoJSON has been doing well so far without any
representation of fuzzy geometry and I think the situation is about the
same for time.

I received an suggestion to consider ISO 8601 style time intervals. This
would allow a single string value to represent an instant or interval,

    "when": "2017-01-04/2017-01-05"

instead of

    "when": {"start": "2017-01-04", "stop": "2017-01-05"}

but this seems harder to use because support for it in parsers is rare.

I was asked about recurring intervals like "every other Friday," but I
think this isn't necessary. GeoJSON doesn't have a concept of non-literal
geometries either.

Some time ago we arrived at rough consensus that "moving objects" and
"event-like features" are either different things or very different models
of the same things. Moving objects are not specified in my draft.

I have two objectives for this draft:

* To establish a common representation for time in GeoJSON that mappers of
events, whether they are scientists or journalists or historians, can share.
* To set an example for other extension projects.

I'd love comments on how it can be improved to better meet those
objectives. Thanks!

-- 
Sean Gillies