Re: [Geojson] Requests for comments on GeoJSON Events draft

[Martin Daly <[e-mail]>]

You know me: I think that the “when” object belongs *inside* the “properties” object.

If everyone did it like that then the implementations would (eventually, if they don’t already) support structure within the “properties” object, which, I think, is more interoperable than N new objects alongside “properties”.

And, purely subjectively, I’d stick with start/end.

Martin


From: GeoJSON [mailto:[e-mail]] On Behalf Of Sean Gillies
Sent: 04 January 2017 09:33
To: [e-mail]
Subject: [Geojson] Requests for comments on GeoJSON Events draft

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