FELN: Find Existing Location with N Layers
In the layers-json post, I argued that the model needs to know what our data means before it can write a useful query. A field called STATUS with a value of 3 is not self-explanatory, and the aliases, domains, and subtypes already sitting in an ArcGIS Pro project are the cheapest explanation we will ever get. That post ended with a catalog, a Layers.json file, and a promise to do something with it. This is the something. FELN stands for Find Existing Location with N layers , and it is a small Python library and CLI that turns a plain-language request into a structured spatial query, compiles that query to DuckDB SQL, and, the part I actually care about, measures how close one query is to another. The shape of a question Most of the spatial questions people ask me over the years have the same skeleton. Find the things in one layer, optionally filtered, that stand in some spatial relationship to the things in another layer, also optionally filter...