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- Hacker News
- Also https://postgis.net/by michaeljhg
- Have been using GeoJSON, very handy and human-readable, but we recently switched to GeoPackage files, as it allows for different layers, each with a different schema for additional data.
GeoPackages also allow to set a proper CRS, which is not as easy in GeoJSON IIRC.
Getting your CRSes wrong is fun...
by ragebol - We used this extensively when I worked in this space (2010 - 2014). My favorite addition was using https://github.com/topojson/topojson to add arcs. That cut down on quite a bit of points to represent curves.by nobleach
- Made by Sean Gillies and a few others. Back when mapbox was doing all sorts of great open source stuff. Legendsby cr125rider
- GeoJSON is super useful. At Getcho (delivery, logistics) we use zip code GeoJSON encodings to draw polygons on zone maps and quickly generate rates. This has been a persistently annoying thing to do until we discovered this format. If you're curious, someone made a repo with all the 2010 census zips a while back [0].
[0] https://github.com/OpenDataDE/State-zip-code-GeoJSON/blob/ma... although you can generate newer versions from the last census.
- I’ve had nothing but problems using GeoJson. The specification has limitations everywhere and doesn’t even support z + m values at the same time.
But thankfully there is also the SQLite backed GeoPackage, which is not only more flexible but also much smaller. It takes some extra steps to get testing teams working due to it’s binary nature, but other than that it is the best format in geospatial data analysis.
Long live SQLite!
by DarkNova6 - I’ve applied GeoJSON (among many other GIS tech) for mapping and monitoring tens of thousands of warehouse robots. It works great as long as you squint just a bit, ignoring that it generally calls for long,lat and is designed with the assumption of a world CRS.
The dangerous part is that some tools fully assume this and will completely screw with calculations if you’re assuming a flatland CRS. So you’ve got to be careful in checking and setting those parameters.
One nice thing is that the structure of GeoJSON works incredibly well in typescript. It has discriminated unions built in so you can walk entire geodatasets in a pretty comfortable way.
by Waterluvian - One task where GeoJSON falls down is simplification of a group of polygons with common boundaries, e.g. the 48 conterminous US states. If you start with a highly detailed set of polygons, you need to simplify them for practical display in an online map.
GeoJSON doesn't encode the fact that the boundary points are common between adjacent polygons. When you simplify those polygons, each one is handled separately, and you end up with "slivers" where the boundaries are misaligned:
https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=map+slivers+betwen+poly...
TopoJSON solves this by encoding each such boundary only once. So when you simplify the polygons, they are all done together, and the same simplification applies to adjacent polygons. No more slivers!
by Stratoscope