Features and Geometry Properties

To understand GML it is necessary to understand the relationship between GML geomery objects and GML features. A feature is an application object like a building, a river or person. It may or may not have geometric aspects. A geometry object is NOT a feature. Note that in some GIS (especially older ones) a feature referred to something on a map and was more or less the same thing as a geometry object. This is NOT the case in GML.

We do not (except in abusing the language) speak in GML of point features or area features. A feature can have various geometric properties that describe aspects or characteristics of the feature. A Building for example might have a position given by a Point geometry object. We do NOT think of the Building as a point, but we can say that the position of the building is given by a point. In GML we might write:

We might also say that the building has a "footprint" or an "extent" and write:

Of course, our Building may have both a position and an extent, as well as other properties and could be encoded as:

GML provides the ability for features to share geometry with one another. This is accomplished using the remote property reference on a geometry property. Remote properties are a general feature of GML borrowed from RDF. If you see (or use) an xlnk:href on a GML property it means that the value of the property is the resource referenced in the link. This can be used for geometry property values.

Suppose we had a Building whose position was given by a Point with identifier p21 (gml:id = "p1"). Suppose also that this Point was also the position of a survey Monument. We might then write in GML something as follows:

Note that the reference is to the shared point and NOT to the SurveyMonument, since the feature object can have more than one geometry property.