Data types

In Map­board GIS, edited fea­tures must be as­signed to a data type. The Data type panel al­lows users to switch data types dur­ing map­ping, and to cre­ate new ar­bi­trary data types for line and poly­gon fea­tures. Typ­i­cally, line fea­tures are used for con­tacts and bound­aries, while poly­gon fea­tures are used for map units.

Only a few line types are ini­tially de­fined, but stan­dard ge­o­log­i­cal line de­f­i­n­i­tions or user-de­fined types can be added eas­ily.

Cur­rently-de­fined line and poly­gon types can be con­trolled by press­ing the swatch to re­veal con­tex­tual ac­tions.

At the edit­ing in­ter­face, line and poly­gon types can be mod­i­fied and given map col­ors. The abil­ity to add map pat­terns is com­ing soon.

Both line and topol­ogy types can par­tic­i­pate in topo­log­i­cal re­la­tion­ships man­aged by the ap­p’s topol­ogy en­gine. These “topo­log­i­cal” data types are de­noted by a poly­gon icon on the right side of the swatch.

The abil­ity to add mul­ti­ple fea­ture types al­lows map­ping to be cus­tomized, to dif­fer­ent field ar­eas and tasks across the geo­sciences.