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 ...

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