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Features API Overview

Overview​

The Planet Features API offers Planet customers the ability to upload and save their Areas of Interest (AOIs) as features on the Planet platform and reference those features when making requests for data through the Planet Orders, Subscriptions, and Data APIs. Once a Feature is saved, it can be accessed as an OGC-compliant Features API.

The Features API is a great way to improve the efficiency of your data delivery workflows by enabling you to store your AOIs once and reference them, as needed, across the platform.

The Features API is available at the Features API Dataset Root.

Key Concepts​

  • Feature: A “thing” with a spatial location and geometry. In the API, the GeoJSON definition of a Feature is used. For example, a Feature could be a farm field polygon in South Africa.

  • Feature Collection: A set of Features.

  • Feature Reference: A reference (URL, ID) to a specific Feature.

Limitations​

  • Only Polygon and MultiPolygon Feature types are supported.
  • Each Feature can have a maximum of 1,500 vertices
  • Users can upload up to 1 million Features across 1 thousand Feature Collections.

Feature References​

Feature references are unique identifiers to specific features in your feature collection, which can be used as a reference to the feature geometry in supported Planet APIs (listed below).

Referring to a collection: pl:features/{dataset}/{collection-id}

Referring to a feature: pl:features/{dataset}/{collection-id}/{feature-id}

Get a Feature Reference ID​

The feature reference ID can be accessed for an individual item in the properties of the particular feature with the key pl:ref The reference ID is helpful for referencing your features when making requests to the Planet delivery APIs. See Retrieve a feature documentation for an example on how to make such a request.

Use the reference ID when making requests to Planet Subscriptions, Orders, and Data APIs so that you don’t have to pass in the GeoJson each time. See below for examples on how to use them with each of these APIs.

Using Feature References in the Planet APIs​

You can use feature references in place of GeoJSON in the following Planet APIs:

  • Data API
  • Orders API
  • Subscriptions API

For more information, see the documentation for each API.

Data API

Learn more about searching the Planet scene catalog.

Subscriptions API

Learn more about creating subscriptions.

Orders API

Learn more about placing orders for Planet data.

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