Geography Markup Language (GML) WG

location based services

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Geography Markup Language is an XML grammar written in XML Schema for the modelling, transport, and storage of geographic information. The key concepts used by Geography Markup Language (GML) to model the world are drawn from the OGC Abstract Specification (available online: http://www.opengeospatial.org/techno/abstract.htm.
GML provides a variety of kinds of objects for describing geography including features, coordinate reference systems, geometry, topology, time, units of measure and generalized values. A geographic feature is "an abstraction of a real world phenomenon; it is a geographic feature if it is associated with a location relative to the Earth”. So a digital representation of the real world can be thought of as a set of features. The state of a feature is defined by a set of properties, where each property can be thought of as a {name, type, value} triple. The number of properties a feature may have, together with their names and types, are determined by its type definition. Geographic features with geometry are those with properties that may be geometry-valued. A feature collection is a collection of features that can itself be regarded as a feature; as a consequence a feature collection has a feature type and thus may have distinct properties of its own, in addition to the features it contains.
Geographic features in GML include coverages and observations as subtypes.
A coverage is a sub-type of feature that has a coverage function with a spatial domain and a value set range of homogeneous 2 to n dimensional tuples. A coverage can represent one feature or a collection of features “to model and make visible spatial relationships between, and the spatial distribution of, earth phenomena.” An observation models the act of observing, often with a camera, a person or some form of instrument (“an act of recognizing and noting a fact or occurrence often involving measurement with instruments”). An observation is considered to be a GML feature with a time at which the observation took place, and with a value for the observation.
A reference system provides a scale of measurement for assigning values “to a location, time or other descriptive quantity or quality”.
A coordinate reference system consists of a set of coordinate system axes that is related to the earth through a datum that defines the size and shape of the earth. Geometries in GML indicate the coordinate reference system in which their measurements have been made. The “parent” geometry element of a geometric complex or geometric aggregate makes this indication for its constituent geometries.
A temporal reference system provides standard units for measuring time and describing temporal length or duration. Following ISO 8601, the Gregorian calendar with UTC is used in GML as the default temporal reference system.
A Units of Measure (UOM) dictionary provides definitions of numerical measures of physical quantities, such as length, temperature, and pressure, and of conversions between UOMs