Example

The technique of reducing conflict by avoiding the reification of a concept is demonstrated if the OGC concept of `Feature Type''. The OGC abstract specification defines the concept of feature type which specifies the attributes (properties) that a feature of that type can have, but the OGC Simple Features for SQL specification avoids making that concept into a manipulatable object and instead each individual feature can be queried as to what attributes it supports. This avoids introducing a new type into the function interface and avoids introducing a new namespace, the list of names of feature types, with its own uniqueness constraints. The savings in elapsed time to produce the standard and to test proposed implementations for conformance more than makes up for the slight inconvenience of not having a standard for feature type itself (which could be introduced into later standards if absolutely required).