[GeoJSON] Aligning implementations

[Tim Schaub]

Chris Holmes wrote:
>> You got me curious about all these people who want to serve up 
>> geographic features with no geometry.  I wonder if you just mean null 
>> or broken geometry - or if there really is a world where people deal 
>> in geography without geometry.
> I mostly mean null or broken geometries.  But I've also got people who 
> are using a WFS to expose their data.  They may have a bunch of tables, 
> say a bunch of samples of rocks and the time they were taken, that are 
> linked to a specific location.  They do a join on the data and present 
> the result, each location has zero or more data samples.  Now presenting 
> this obviously has a location, and can go through WMS and WFS.
> 
> So they've already exposed their data.  But if they want to just expose 
> their data samples table, then it's easy as pie if they've already got a 
> WFS configured for their other data.  They just turn it on, and it's 
> able to spit out XML, and if we do this, then JSON as well, through the 
> WFS protocol.  And indeed eventually I may even try for a more RESTful 
> feature service that exposes GeoJSON.  If organizations have it set up 
> for their geospatial data, then they can easily turn it on for other 
> data.  I think it's great if WMS/WFS is the way in to organizations 
> exposing their data to the web.  And yes, I realize that it then won't 
> be GeoJSON, and then we just wouldn't include a geometry.  But if you 
> have an application that doesn't necessarily use the geospatial part of 
> the geojson data it's working against then it could benefit from this.
> 
> Chris


Sure, I think encouraging people to use JSON and XML to serve 
non-spatial data is a good idea.