Boost.Geometry    Boost C++ Libraries
OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium)

OGC is the Open Geospatial Consortium, the standardization committee on Geospatial Interoperability and GIS (Geographical Information Systems). OGC geometries are used in many environments and databases.

The Generic Geometry Library uses OGC conventions for algorithms and for geometry type names. Note that though OGC is concentrating on GIS, the conventions followed here are 'geometry only', the so-called 'simple features' (simple in the sense that polygons are not allowed to have self-intersections).

OGC specifies a library based on inheritance, as opposed to this library, which is a generic template based library where data classes are separated from the algorithms. Therefore this library is not an OGC implementation in the strict sense.

Classes

OGC defines the following geometry classes, which are implemented as concepts (and as geometries) in the Generic Geometry Library:

And multi-geometries:

The naming of these classes is used in:

and in many databases:

Besides this the Generic Geometry Library provides the following additional classes:

Finally geometry types can be added as extensions. This is e.g. done with an "n-sphere" meaning "circle" and "sphere". Circle is convenient for selections.

Differences

The Generic Geometry Library does not implement the OGC Simple Feature interface exactly and completely. There are many differences. Below the most important differences are listed.

More information on OGC can be found on their website, http://www.opengeospatial.org and on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Geospatial_Consortium


April 2, 2011

Copyright © 2007-2011 Barend Gehrels, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Copyright © 2008-2011 Bruno Lalande, Paris, France
Copyright © 2009-2010 Mateusz Loskot, London, UK
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