GeoJSON

GeoJSON is a lightweight, open standard format for representing geographic features and their attributes using JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). Standardized as RFC 7946 by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), GeoJSON has become the dominant format for geospatial dataGeospatial DataGeospatial data encompasses information about the location, shape, and relationships of physical features on Earth. I... exchange in web applications, APIs, and modern mapping platforms. Its human-readable text structure and native compatibility with JavaScript and web technologies make it an essential format in the modern geospatial ecosystem.

A GeoJSON document is organized into Feature and FeatureCollection objects. A Feature contains a geometry object describing the spatial element and a properties object containing attribute data. A FeatureCollection is an array of Feature objects. GeoJSON supports seven geometry types: Point, MultiPoint, LineString, MultiLineString, Polygon, MultiPolygon, and GeometryCollection. Coordinates are expressed as arrays of longitude-latitude pairs in the WGS84 (EPSG:4326) coordinate reference system, as mandated by the RFC 7946 specification. The format uses a right-hand rule for polygon winding order and supports bounding boxBounding BoxA bounding box is the minimum axis-aligned rectangle that completely encloses a geographic feature or dataset, define... declarations for spatial extent.

GeoJSON is the backbone of web-based geospatial applications. Mapping libraries like LeafletLeafletLeaflet is a lightweight, mobile-friendly JavaScript library for building interactive mapping applications. Known for..., MapboxMapboxMapbox is a robust platform that equips developers with tools to create highly customizable, interactive maps for web... GL JS, and OpenLayersOpenLayersOpenLayers is a mature, open-source JavaScript library for building interactive web maps that support a wide range of... natively consume and render GeoJSON data. RESTful geospatial APIs commonly return query results in GeoJSON format, enabling seamless integration with web front-ends. GitHub renders GeoJSON files directly as interactive maps in repositories. Data visualization tools like D3.js use GeoJSON for creating custom cartographic visualizations. Open data portals increasingly provide GeoJSON downloads alongside traditional formats. Mobile mapping applications use GeoJSON for lightweight data transfer and offline caching.

GeoJSON's text-based JSON structure is human-readable and easily debugged, unlike binary formats. It integrates seamlessly with web technologies, requiring no special parsers beyond standard JSON libraries. The format supports mixed geometry types within a single FeatureCollection, offering flexibility that Shapefiles lack. GeoJSON is self-contained in a single file, avoiding the multi-file management issues of Shapefiles. The format has extensive tooling support across programming languages and platforms, with libraries available for Python, JavaScript, Java, R, and virtually every other language used in geospatial development.

As a text-based format, GeoJSON files are larger than binary equivalents, which can impact transfer speeds and storage for large datasets. The format lacks built-in spatial indexingSpatial IndexingSpatial indexing organizes geospatial data into efficient data structures that dramatically accelerate location-based..., making it less efficient for spatial queries on large datasets compared to indexed formats. GeoJSON does not natively support topologyTopologyTopology in GIS defines the spatial relationships between geographic features, including adjacency, connectivity, and..., coordinate reference systems other than WGS84, or raster dataRaster DataRaster data represents geographic information as a grid of cells or pixels, where each cell holds a value representin.... Very complex geometries with many vertices can produce large files that challenge web browser memory limits.

Newline-delimited GeoJSON (GeoJSONL) enables streaming processing of large datasets line by line. TopoJSON, an extension of GeoJSON, eliminates redundant geometry by encoding topologyTopologyTopology in GIS defines the spatial relationships between geographic features, including adjacency, connectivity, and..., dramatically reducing file sizes for adjacent polygons. GeoJSON-LD adds semantic web capabilities through JSON-LD context. Cloud-native geospatial platforms increasingly use GeoJSON as the interchange format between processing stages.