This is an abstract superclass within which all geometric objects are spatially referenced in SAIF. All objects belonging to this superclass have position specified directly or indirectly through their constituent components. The high level structure of GeometricObject is shown below.
qualifier: this provides for a categorical notion of fuzziness with regards to position.
If used, qualifier typically would pertain to all aspects of the geometry of a geographic object. However, it may also be used with only a portion of the geometry. For example, consider a marsh with one side of the marsh considered as definite and the other side as indefinite. The geometry of the marsh would be a polygon with qualifier not specified; however, for the arcs constituting the boundary of the polygon, a value for qualifier could be given. If used, qualifier should be specified at the highest level possible. Thus in the example, qualifier would be specified for the arcs but not their component points.
A quantitative notion of fuzziness may be given by using the likelyPositionalError attribute of SpatialReferencing or the likelyTimeError attribute of TemporalReferencing in the metadata.