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Development Status

The SpatialJSON format is still a playground for implementing several optimizations to transfer even huge amounts of spatial data from the server to the client efficiently:

  1. Opt. 1: Removing redundant schema information, see topic
  2. Opt. 2: Removing redundant attribute values (e. g. shared string table), see topic
  3. Opt. 3: Handling sparse rows (most values are NULL) more efficiently
  4. Opt. 4: Reducing space required for geometries (e. g. differential coordinates)

Bold items have already been implemented.

The shown optimizations are ordered from simple to implement to hard to implement (not really hard, however). That's also the intended order of implementation. Although some optimizations are optional, all optimizations could be in effect at the same time. Then, each optimization contributes his part to lower the space required for encoding a certain set of features.

In some cases, however, it may be useful to specify which optimizations shall be used for a request. Several techniques are available to give a client the ability to specify the set of SpatialJSON optimizations it is able or willing to use (e. g. parameter format_options, additional outputFormat parameters). It's still not clear how this will be implemented and how fine grained that will be.