Mobile Location Services: The Definitive Guide

2. Overview of GML

2.1. Design goals

GML was developed with a number of explicit design goals, a few of which overlap the objectives of XML itself:

• provide a means of encoding spatial information for both data transport and data storage, especially in a wide-area Internet context;

• be sufficiently extensible to support a wide variety of spatial tasks, from portrayal to analysis;

• establish the foundation for Internet GIS in an incremental and modular fashion;

• allow for the efficient encoding of geo-spatial geometry (e.g. data compression);

• provide easy-to-understand encodings of spatial information and spatial relationships, including those defined by the OGC Simple Features model;

• be able to separate spatial and non-spatial content from data presentation ...