I accept I am being a pedant here, but feel the semantics are important..
If I were to drawn a path representing a 'route' between 3 random points on the earth's surface, then establish the nearest elevation points, say every 20m along that path, would you consider that set of triples to be the:
- The 'Route Elevation'
- The 'Route Contour'
- Something else
The definition seems to be used interchangeably, and I'm not sure which one is (more) correct.
The definition of 'Contour' - as I understand it, has a specific meaning of equivalence ie. the line is of constant value along its length, which a path containing various elevations wouldn't be.
Yet the definition of 'Elevation' is a height above a specific datum point, rather than a collection of triples describing it.
The reason this data is an array of triples not just an array of elevation values is the route can be explicitly declared as a pair of lat/longs, however my elevation data may not fall exactly along that path, and so will be an array of triples separate from the route data.