Spatial objects describe various types of either topographic items (such as mountains, streets, or buildings) or geographic features (conceptual areas such as municipal boundaries, auto rating territories, or statistical analysis areas). These features can be described mathematically as points, lines, or polygons and are saved in a spatial file. GDL is able to access these spatial files and the objects they contain to perform two basic types of comparison operations: linear distance and percentage overlap.
Linear Distance
GDL can return a distance value in feet that describes either how close or far away a given point or line is from a geo-variance buffer. For example, the distance from a house to a fire station or the distance from the edge of a potential mudslide area to a specific building.
Percentage Overlap
Once GDL has created a geo-variance buffer, it is able to calculate if the buffer overlaps with another polygon and, if it does, how much it overlaps. The percentage value returned describes the probability that a point falls in the comparison area. This addresses an often typical problem of whether or not an address falls inside a specific area. For example, is a particular house in a flood zone.