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an offline map explorer where each world, from a game map to a city's open data, ships as one .atlas file

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atlas / docs / semconv / REGISTRY.md
REGISTRY.md 6.4K source

Atlas semantic conventions — registry v2

The shared language of the format: attribute keys that carry display and geometry meaning from a producer, through composition, into the bundle, and out to every reader.

This document is generated from spec/registry.yaml. So is format/semconv's registry, and so are the TypeScript lanes' key constants. Edit the spec, run go generate ./format/semconv, and commit what changes; spec/gen's test holds the committed artifacts to the generator's output, so the three can never disagree.

A bundle declares the vocabulary it was written against in its manifest: "conventions": 2. The number moves only when an existing key's meaning breaks; new keys arrive as experimental and earn stable. v2 is such a break: it collapsed the v1 entities zone, category, and location into collection and feature when the format unified them — every kind of thing on a world is a feature, every named set of them a collection — and renamed atlas.category.key to atlas.collection.key to match.

Entities

Entity What it is Where its attributes ride
bundle one .atlas file: one volume reserved; no key attaches here yet
world one ground within the volume worlds/<slug>.json → attrs
collection one ordered group of features worlds/<slug>.json → collections[].attrs
feature one point, path, or area inline features[].attrs, or worlds/<slug>.text → <id>.a

Attributes

Key Entity Values Stability Meaning
atlas.geometry.kind collection point | path | area stable What shape of thing the collection holds. Declared once per collection; every feature in it is that kind, and readers pick rendering and UX by this key instead of sniffing geometry types.
atlas.label.policy collection always | quiet experimental Whether an area collection's features wear their names on the map always, or quietly — only on highlight, selection, or an explicit reveal. Area collections only; absent means always for areas, and paths are always quiet.
atlas.render.as collection pin | text stable How a point collection's features draw: markers, or floating text labels. Absent means pin; no payload carries a display-type field, and only ingestion still reads one to speak this key for old captures.
atlas.icon.std collection set/name, e.g. maki/mountain stable Standard-library icon for a collection without artwork. Resolved to embedded bytes at build time; a reader only sees the resolved asset.
atlas.icon.kind collection glyph | picture stable Whether the icon asset is a monochrome glyph the reader tints, or a picture drawn as-is. Names what a file suffix used to imply.
atlas.icon.outset world light | dark stable The rim a world's markers wear to stay legible against its art.
atlas.geometry.surface world plane | sphere stable What the raster pictures. Absent means plane.
atlas.geometry.projection world equirect stable How a sphere was flattened. Required when surface is sphere.
atlas.geometry.equirect.px world x,y,w,h (world px) stable The raster window the projection fills.
atlas.geometry.equirect.deg world west,north,east,south (degrees) stable The ground that window pictures.
atlas.geometry.mercator.px world x,y,w,h (world px) experimental The raster window a Web-Mercator cut fills. Where equirect declares y linear in degrees, mercator declares y linear in projected latitude — asinh(tan lat) — the flattening a real-world tile window actually is.
atlas.geometry.mercator.deg world west,north,east,south (degrees) experimental The ground the Mercator window pictures, in degrees at its edges.
atlas.geometry.body world slug, e.g. mars experimental The body pictured.
atlas.geometry.radius_km world decimal string experimental The body's mean radius.
atlas.geo.lat feature decimal degrees experimental True planetary latitude as published (planetocentric). Provenance and card material; rendering derives from the world-level mapping.
atlas.geo.lon feature decimal degrees experimental True planetary longitude as published (east-positive).
atlas.hydro.huc12 feature twelve digits experimental The USGS twelve-digit hydrologic unit — the subwatershed — the feature's ground lies wholly within, from the national Watershed Boundary Dataset. A feature spanning subwatersheds carries no key rather than a misleading one.
atlas.stroke.width_px collection positive decimal (world px) experimental The ground width of a path collection's features: a trail is a line and a weight, and the weight lets a reader draw the path as one continuous stroke.
atlas.collection.key collection slug experimental A collection's merge identity across sources. Absent, the icon key stands in.

Policy names (never written to a payload)

Name Meaning
atlas.note.text A feature's description, as a merge policy table and its ledger name it, so "which description wins" is decided and recorded in the same vocabulary as everything else. It is deliberately unregistered: Validate refuses it on any entity.

Rules

  • Producer-side (strict): any atlas.* key not in this registry, attached to the wrong entity, or carrying a value outside its vocabulary fails the build. semconv.Validate and semconv.Check are that gate.
  • Reader-side (lenient): unknown keys are ignored. A bundle is never refused over conventions. semconv.EntityOf reporting false is a cue to skip an attribute, not to fail.
  • Keys outside the atlas. namespace are not this registry's business and pass through untouched.
  • sphere requires projection and both equirect.* mappings; the declared mapping must invert — a packed position run backward through it recovers the source's published coordinates.
  • atlas.icon.std, once declared, must be resolved to a real icon asset by the time the bundle is written.
  • A collection's atlas.geometry.kind, when declared, must agree with the kind field on the wire.
  • atlas.label.policy attaches only to area collections; a declaration on any other kind fails validation.