feature type

Depending on how it is structured, a dataset can contain multiple feature types. For example, an Excel spreadsheet (workbook) can contain one or more worksheets; each of these worksheets is a feature type. For a database, one table is a feature type. For a GIS dataset, any layers that exist in the original dataset (for example, each road, building, or river) would be a separate feature type.

Feature types (along with their associated attributes) are represented as objects on the Workbench canvas. Reader feature types represent the data being read, and writer feature types represent the data being written.