A representation of an area defined by lines that make up its boundary. For example, it may represent a building footprint, parcel, city limits, or country’s boundary.

a procedure that calculates the geometric relationships between two geographic representations (usually applied to vector models); used to merge attribute information .

Data type that describes a point or geometry potentially occupied by an object or person.

Closeness of coordinate value to the true or accepted value in a specified reference system.

This listing of geospatial terms was developed at the direction of the MetroGIS Policy Board to help its members better understand recommendations they are asked to consider. This listing is intended to be a starting place. As the need is recognized, additions and modifications are to be incorporated. Users are encouraged to offer such modifications as they recognize the need. Proprietary Terms/Products are followed by “ ** “. It is understood that the listing of these terms is incomplete.

A mathematical model that transforms the locations of features on the Earth’s surface (sphere) to locations on a two-dimensional surface (flat map).

coordinate transformation that converts latitude longitude measurements into planar coordinates. Projections can be based on a developable surface (such as a plane, cylinder, or cone) or on a mathematical function.

an approach to categorization that defines a category by identifying a particular object as the typical example. Other objects assigned to this category may not not share all characteristics with the prototype object. The degree of resemblance can be treated as a distance in a taxonomic space.

In the context of Web Services, publish means to advertise data and services to a broker (such as registry, catalog or clearinghouse). A service provider contacts the service broker to publish (or unpublish) a service. A service provider typically publishes to the broker metadata describing its capabilities and network address. Find is used by service requestors to locate specific service types or instances. Service requestors describe the kinds of services they're looking for to the broker and the broker responds by delivering results that match the request. Service requestors typically use metadata published to the broker to find service providers of interest. Bind results after a service requestor and a service provider successfully negotiate so the requestor can access and invoke services of the provider. A service requestor typically uses service metadata provided by the broker to bind to a service provider. The service requestor can either use a proxy generator to generate the code that can bind to the service, or can use the service description to manually implement the binding before accessing that service.