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Concept
Geographical feature
Summary
A feature (also called an object or entity), in the context of geography and geographic information science, is a discrete phenomenon that exists at a location in the space and scale of relevance to geography; that is, at or near the surface of Earth, at a moderate to global scale. It is one of the primary types of phenomena represented in geographic information, such as that represented in maps, geographic information systems, remote sensing imagery, statistics, and other forms of geographic discourse. Such representations of features consists of descriptions of their inherent nature, their spatial form and location, and their characteristics or properties.
The term "feature" is meant to be broad and inclusive, including both natural and human-constructed phenomena. It is metaphysically neutral, including both phenomena that exist physically (e.g. a building) and those that are conceptual or social creations (e.g. a neighbourhood). In an ontological sense, the term is generally restricted to endurants, which are wholly present at any time during their lifespan (e.g., the state of New York in 1820 was a complete state, and is the same state as the New York in 2021). A feature is also discrete, meaning that it has a clear identity distinct from other phenomena, and is comprehended as a whole, defined in part by the boundary of its extent (although this can be problematic when vagueness arises, such as in the boundaries of a "valley"). This differentiates features from geographic processes and events, which are perdurants that only exist in time; and from geographic masses and fields, which are continuous in that they are not conceptualized as a distinct whole.
In geographic information science, the terms feature, object, and entity are generally used as roughly synonymous. In the 1992 Spatial Data Transfer Standard (SDTS), one of the first public standard models of geographic information, an attempt was made to formally distinguish them: an entity as the real-world phenomenon, an object as a representation thereof (e.
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