Simple Features for protobuf and others

The Simple Feature Access Specification (aka. Simple Features) is a common standard for exchanging spatial features that is widely used in geoinformatics in Open Source projects as well as in proprietary programs. It defines a generic data model for storing and accessing geographic data and their geometry types.

Protocol Buffers is a format for data serialization which has inbuilt features such as binary serialization, RPC frameworks and IDL. Its unique features such as flexible, efficient, automated mechanism for serializing structured data but with smaller, faster, and simpler manner makes it a very good candidate for ​ data serialization use cases.

JTS Topology Suite (JTS), which is a free and open source library containing geometries that correspond to the Simple Feature Access Standard.

Main goal of the project is to define and implement of a serialization API based on JTS, which transparently serializes geometries based on the Simple Feature specification using Protocol Buffers. Extending support for other serialization frameworks such as Avro and support for raster data will also be addressed based on time constraints.