Hello Andrea and Jukka,
you've seen the mail from Howard Butler. What to make out of it? He doesn't like such "extended" formats (which I do understand) but also recognizes that he's not in a position to actually do anything against it.
For my mind, there are these options for the community plugin's name:
- Slim GeoJSON
- Tiny GeoJSON (in order to line up with Tiny WKB)
or more defensively
- SpatialJSON,
omitting Small/Thin/Slim/Tiny as SpatialJSON is a new format which inherently is more compact and space optimized than GeoJSON. (Thanks Andrea for the "Spatial" idea.)
As I'm not really interested in inventing and promoting a new cool format, I could be quite fine with SpatialJSON.
What do you think about it?
Cheers
Carsten
Am 10.10.2022 um 14:40 schrieb Howard Butler:
Carsten,
Given the tone of your email and the fact that you are writing it, I think you probably know what our answer will be. It is a new format. It is not compatible with GeoJSON and any other GeoJSON reader is going to fail reading it. It is not GeoJSON, and it seems like disingenuous marketing to call it a similar name in my opinion.
It is totally fine to be making these optimizations and trying to proliferate them. You are definitely not the first to try. GeoJSONL would seem to be related to your approach. You could also look at FlatGeoBuf, which has GeoServer support, but gives up on JSON to have more features. Or wait for OGC to come out with their "new and improved GeoJSON" in the form of OGC Features API output, which adds even more capability.
I don't like formats that are "kind of like GeoJSON but not compatible" trying to leverage GeoJSON's marketing reach, and this includes things like GeoJSONL, SlimGeoJSON, and OGC's effort, which they tried to call it "Enhanced GeoJSON", as if it needed enhancement. GeoJSON is not internationally trademarked, and it cannot really stop these efforts from trying to trade on its name. However, "GeoJSON" is such a generic term it probably could not obtain a trademark, and other efforts calling themselves something that looks like it could not be stopped in any official capacity anyway.
In closing, you can call it what you like. Naming things is really hard
Howard
On Oct 10, 2022, at 1:31 AM, Carsten Klein <c.klein@anonymised.com> wrote:
This format adds only two small changes to GeoServer's GeoJSON format (the version before RFC 7946). Nevertheless, these changes make it incompatible with regular GeoJSON and actually make it a new format. Other optimizations may come on top in the future.
Primarily, I need that format for my own projects, in which web based clients may request some thousands of features, each with approx. 450 fields/properties. Here, omitting repeated property names actually saves up to 70% of space (~ 50% transfer size).
Suggested by the GeoServer team, I'm asking you whether you would agree that I name this new format something like "Slim GeoJSON" or "Tiny GeoJSON" (see. Tiny Well Known Binary, TWKB) prior to releasing anything to the internet.
Since the new format is actually based on GeoJSON with only two small (but, of course, incompatible) changes, I'm really in favor for a name which still includes the ´GeoJSON´ term.
