Soft Querying Features in GeoJSON Documents: The GeoSoft Proposal

Since the advent of JSON as a popular format for exchanging large amounts of data, a novel category of NoSQL database systems, named JSON document stores, has emerged for storing JSON data sets; in fact, these novel databases are able to natively manage collections of JSON documents. To help analysts and data engineers query and integrate JSON data sets persistently saved in JSON document stores, the J-CO Framework has been developed (at the University of Bergamo, Italy): it is built around a novel query language, named J-CO-QL + , that provides sophisticated features, including soft-querying capabilities. However, J-CO-QL + (as the other languages for querying JSON data sets) is designed to be general purpose; consequently, it can be cumbersome for users to apply it on specific data formats. This is the case of GeoJSON, a specific and popular JSON data format that is designed to represent geographical information layers. This paper presents the latest evolution of GeoSoft, a novel high-level “domain-specific language” that is specifically designed to express complex queries on the GeoJSON documents, including soft-queries. GeoSoft is inspired to the classical SQL language, so as to reduce the learning curve of potential users. GeoSoft queries are translated into J-CO-QL + scripts, to be actually executed.