GeoSoft: A Language for Soft Querying Features Within GeoJSON Information Layers

GeoJSON has become one of the most popular format for representing spatial information. Its popularity is due to the fact that it relies on JSON as hosting syntactic structure. Currently, querying in an effective way a GeoJSON document, to extract features of interests, can be hard, for various reasons. In this paper, we propose a domain-specific language named GeoSoft: it is a high-level tool that hides details of the GeoJSON format, which enables soft querying of features, to express imprecise queries. The paper shows that a GeoSoft query can be effectively and automatically translated into a J-CO-QL script, which is executed by the J-CO Framework, i.e., the execution engine we chose for GeoSoft.