What is a Contact?

A contact is a general concept representing any kind of surface separating two geologic units, including primary boundaries such as depositional contacts, all kinds of unconformities, intrusive contacts, and gradational contacts, as well as faults that separate geologic units.

Realizations

Data model	Concept name	Definition
OGC GeoSciML	Contact	A contact is a general concept representing any kind of surface separating two geologic units, including primary boundaries such as depositional contacts, all kinds of unconformities, intrusive contacts, and gradational contacts, as well as faults that separate geologic units.
IFC	Contact	Same as OGC GeoSciML

Properties

PropertyName	Definition
identifier	Globally unique identifier:Primitive::CharacterString shall uniquely identifies a tuple within the dataset and be formatted as an absolute URI conformant to RFC 3986.
name	name reports the display name for the Contact.
description	description reports the description of the Contact, typically taken from an entry on a geological map legend.
contactType	contactType reports the type of Contact (as defined in GeoSciML) as a human readable label. To report an identifier from a controlled vocabulary, contactType_uri shall be used.
observationMethod	observationMethod reports a metadata snippet indicating how the spatial extent of the feature was determined. ObservationMethod is a convenience property that provides a quick and simple approach to observation metadata when data are reported using a feature view (as opposed to observation view).
positionalAccuracy	positionalAccuracy reports quantitative values defining the radius of an uncertainty buffer around a MappedFeature (e.g., a positionalAccuracy of 100 m for a line feature defines a buffer polygon of total width 200 m centred on the line).
source	source contains a text describing feature-specific details and citations to source materials, and if available providing URLs to reference material and publications describing the contact feature. This could be a short text synopsis of key information that would also be in the metadata record referenced by metadata_uri.
metadata_uri	metadata_uri reports a URI referring to a metadata record describing the provenance of data.
genericSymbolizer	genericSymbolizer contains an identifier for a symbol from standard (locally or community defined) symbolization scheme for portrayal.
Shape	The property shape:GM_Object contains a geometry defining the extent of the contact feature.
DipDirection	The geographic direction of a line created by the intersection of a plane and the horizontal plane. If non specific convention is used, this angular value is in the range 0 to 18 degrees. In this case, there is an ambiguity on the dip orientation. For example, a plane with an orientation of 90 degrees from the nord could either have a dip direction to the North or to the South. Thus, to avoid this ambiguity, a strike value is generally completed with an indication of the dip orientation (Quadrant).

FAQ

GitHub issue

https://github.com/opengeospatial/Geotech/issues/8