RFC 65: RFC 7946 GeoJSON

Authors: Sean Gillies

Contact: sean at mapbox.com

Status: Development

Implementation version: ?

Summary

GeoJSON has been standardized by the IETF: ​RFC 7946. Updates to the OGR GeoJSON driver are needed so that it may write RFC 7946 GeoJSON.

Rationale

The RFC 7946 standard is backwards compatible with the legacy definition of GeoJSON, but has a few differences (see ​https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7946#appendix-B). For OGR, the most significant are: removal of "crs" (CRS84 only), counter-clockwise winding of polygons, geometry splitting at the antimeridian, and representation of bounding boxes at the antimeridian and poles.

Consensus on the gdal-dev list is that developers should be able to require RFC 7946 GeoJSON by configuring GDAL with an option or environment variable and that it be an all-or-nothing switch.

Changes

A configuration option will be added for the GeoJSON driver, e.g., OGR_GEOJSON_RFC7946=TRUE. When "on", OGR will write GeoJSON with CRS84 coordinates (reprojecting as needed) with 7 places of precision by default, polygons wound properly, and geometries split at the antimeridian.

Updated drivers

GeoJSON

SWIG bindings (Python / Java / C# / Perl) changes

None

Utilities

Utilities will implement RFC 7946 by using the configuration option.

Documentation

Documentation of the new configuration option will reference RFC 7946.

Test Suite

The tests of the updated drivers test the effect of the new method.

Compatibility Issues

TODO

Related ticket

TODO

Implementation

Implementation will be done by Even Rouault and be sponsored by Mapbox.

Voting history

TODO