Required geometry and centroids

[kiselev-dv]

There is an issue, when you looking for big admin. boundary or a way, encoding a full geometry into the answer may cause a big overhead, but this is a required field.

So in many cases, we want to return centroids (or any kind of reference points only). For such purposes, there is centroid field in GeoJSON geomery object. But I think it couldn't be used without coordinates of geometry.

So do someone see the way how not to return centroids instead of full geometries and not to break GeoJSON compatibility?

[yohanboniface]

Good point!
I guess that if you return a "Point" geometry, instead of a "Polygon", for an admin boundary, it may be implicit that you are returning the centroid and not the original shape.
But implicit is rarelly a good thing, so I'm not saying this is the ultimate answer to the issue you raised.

[kiselev-dv]

Yes, at least, in case you have returned a centroid instead of full geometry as geometry object, it should be clearly marked, that it's not an actual geometry.

[yohanboniface]

Yes, at least, in case you have returned a centroid instead of full geometry as geometry object, it
should be clearly marked, that it's not an actual geometry.

Agreed.

@sgillies, any idea on this topic?

[sgillies]

Could the result features carry a geocoding.representative_point = true property to indicate that the geometry is only a representative point and not the complete geometry of the entity in your database and/or carry a link to the most complete and detailed GeoJSON data for the entity?