RE: Linked railway data for the UK

On Fri, 2009-05-15 at 06:44 +0100, Michael Smethurst wrote:
> http://ontologi.es/rail/stations/gb/MAN.rdf
> 
> and wondering if there's some confusion between location and
> administrative office / postal address.
> 
> in the case of piccadilly it's a complex of buildings. the admin
> office / postal address is in a high rise alongside the actual station
> and only connected by a covered walkway. hence the vcard of:
> 
> <vcard:label xml:lang="en">9th Floor, Piccadilly Tower, Piccadilly
> station. Manchester M1 2PZ</vcard:label>
> 
> which i guess would be more suitable for helicopters than trains :-)

vCard's label property is defined as "the the formatted text
corresponding to delivery address of the object the vCard represents",
so the RDF seems correct to me. If you wanted to have a letter delivered
to the station, then that's the formatted text that you'd put on the
envelope.

Perhaps the HTML could be made a little clearer though, and list
"Address" and "Location" as separate items of data.

> but the lat, long is given as: 53.4775, -2.2313 which is also the
> admin building. whereas dbpedia has lat long of 53.477001, -2.230000
> which is the actual station

Six decimal places of a degree (as per dbpedia) locates an object rather
more precisely than is sensible for railway stations which are typically
rather big constructions (esp. Manchester Piccadilly if I recall
correctly - I've not been to Manchester in almost 10 years). 0.000001
latitude is about 1 metre. 0.000001 longitude varies depending on where
you are on Earth, but in the UK represents about 60 or 70 centimetres.

If I've given a station's location as 53.4775, -2.2313 and some part of
the station lies in the bounding box:

 53.47755, -2.23125 ---------- 53.47755, -2.23135
         |                             |
         |                             |
 53.47745, -2.23125----------- 53.47745, -2.23135

then I'm happy.

> not sure if there are any stations where the admin office is off site
> but i guess that's not impossible and might prove problematic in the
> future?1? anyway, just thought i'd point this out in case it caused
> any clashing claim problems when trying to mesh up with dbpedia,
> geonames etc

My links to geonames were going to be to the city / town / suburb which
the station serves, but actually there do seem to be a number of railway
stations listed on geonames.org, so I might try linking up with them
too.

-- 
Toby Inkster <tai@g5n.co.uk>

Received on Friday, 15 May 2009 09:29:17 UTC