Saving GDF with columnar metadata

[alex-s-gardner]

columnar metadata is critical for keeping track of things like units, sources, timestamp exc..

Is there a GDF.write method that supports writing/reading of table metadata?

[evetion]

At the moment no. Afaik GDAL doesn't have a concept of columnar metadata and the only (geo)spatial format that does is Arrow. Even then, with metadata you might be restricted to Strings only.

In Julia we have columnar metadata support on DataFrames and we could make a geospatial vector type that also stores it.

[alex-s-gardner]

Having a geo format that could support both metadata and geometries could lay a foundation greater flexibility when working with geo tables. This could also open up options for better integration with DD if we can store dimensions information in the metadata.

[alex-s-gardner]

we could make a geospatial vector type

Is this a big lift and how would it work?

[evetion]

Depends on how much functionality we put in. Think of it as a wrapper, or a wrapper with a spatial index a la geoacceleratedarrays. It seems less work than a GeoDataFrame type.