ABSTRACT
Contexts of concern will often involve spatial “layers” of formed features consisting of coordinates or connected coordinates with associated attributes. The coordinates will consist of coupled latitude and longitude values or pairs on planar projections. Each feature will have an individual identi¢er indexing a line of a spreadsheet with the associated attributes as columns. A feature’s form will be that of a point, a path, or patch(es). These three types will be segregated in layers, with a layer consisting entirely of points, entirely of paths, or entirely of patches. The types are considered as “topologies” in the terminology of geographic information systems (GIS). These will be “thematic” layers, with the features in a given layer pertaining to some subject. Patches in a particular layer will be spatially adjacent or isolated but not overlapping. In a typical GIS, the topological information regarding spatial structure is stored separately from the attribute information, with a feature identi¢er (FID) serving as linkage (see Section 2.7). In this chapter, we pursue particulars of our localization paradigm as applied to ¢xed-form features using Lackawanna County as a laboratory.
