I know the concept of schemas from XML and databases, and I hope it has the same meaning in GIS.
I have to record some data about street light and hand it over to the municipality as a Shapefile. They specified that they want a zipped folder containing a Shapefile, and they specified a number of attributes that are required. However the attributes were given to me as a list in human readable language. Here are a few examples from the list:
- Lamp type
- Height
- Power
- Night energy saving
However, they did not specify the name of the attributes within the database. If I understand correctly, an attribute name can be no longer than ten characters so someone would have to decide what to call ´night energy saving´ in ten characters. Furthermore, they did not specify a datatype (including length/precision) for any of them.
I will do the best I can with what I was told, but this situation made me wonder.
How does someone specify the format/schema in which they want data.
Is there a kind of file that defines the format/schema?
If I understand correctly the format/schema is self contained within the Shapefile, so perhaps the correct approach is to distribute an empty Shapefile?
And how does one verify if a Shapefile is valid according to a schema?
