Giraffe is much easier to understand once you understand the way the Giraffe engine works.

There is a very clear flow of data through the app, and when you understand it, the tool is a lot less mysterious.

You’ll find you can do days of work in minutes.

Giraffe projects contain geometries created in Giraffe called sections, section templates called usages, data layers, apps, views. All that is explained here.

Flow Chart of the Giraffe Data Model. Does a picture really say 1000 words?

1. In Giraffe you can draw a polyline by clicking on the map, and apply parameters to that polyline. (The polyline is a geoJSON geometry)

   

   • A special parameter called usage references you to apply a collection of parameters that you define in the Usage Editor.
   • Giraffe takes the parameters and converts the polyline into an urban element. eg. a building.
   • Giraffe will create reports from the polyline area in combination with the applied parameters.

2. In Giraffe Flow builder you can apply transforms to simple geometries. A transform takes one geometry, and creates another.

   

   • Each transform can be configured with input parameters.
   • The transforms can be connected together in countless ways to automate workflows. (Save your flows, and share or reuse them.)

3. Giraffe elements that you have drawn have geometric properties (like area) and also the parameters you have applied to them.

   

   • Giraffe lets you use geometric properties, and also parameters, to define an analytic measure.
   • Giraffe displays each measure as a row in a custom report.

Features

At an abstract level, a Feature (aka a Section) is a geometry with some properties. It’s saved in Giraffe as a GeoJSON feature. Some common examples in Giraffe are a building, a stretch of road or a tree. These are simply geometries: a polygon, line and point respectively; along with some Properties such as the building’s height, the road’s width or the type of tree.

Features belong to a project. You can copy them to other projects, but you can’t share the same feature between projects.

Usages

If you have multiple sections with similar properties, it’s helpful to pull out the common ones into a shared “usage”. You could have multiple sections which are all floorToFloor: 9ft, levels: 3, color: pink. Rather than adding these to each section individually, you give each section usage: Residential, then put all the shared properties on that usage.

It’s an abstract but powerful concept and we struggled to give it a clear name. We could have called usages typologies, categories, programs, or categories instead.

Usages also belong to a project, you can copy them to other projects, but you can’t share usages between projects.

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