Re: Places & Naming Conventions

replies to various messages below.

> From Clinton Gallagher:
>
> Is there an RDF markup available for one to use with regard to places and
> their names?

I don't know of any *RDF* markup efforts.  There are efforts in
knowledge representation (see below).   Wouldn't be too surprised to
hear someone else has has this idea (RDF markup) too.  Would be glad to
hear if anyone knows of any efforts.

> From Charles McCathieNevile:
>
> There are a group of people working on geography on the Web. But you could
> always create a URI based on the latitude/lomgitude or GPS coordinates or
> something (I don't know what these are) and do it like that...

Well, I don't know.  It would need to include the datum, for one thing,
then there would be issues of representing places on different scales,
e.g., a town that is represented by a point on one scale would be a
blob on a different scale, etc.


> From Heiko Grussbach:
> 
> Yes, thats correct. At least I would be interested, what people
> think about how useful it would be to have that.

Useful, I think, but we'd have to be extra-careful about defining the
scope and purpose of a schema.  Probably a good idea to start from
geographic and GIS conventions and concepts, especially coverages,
themes, and feature classes.  For acceptability in GIS and geographers,
it almost certainly needs to be integrated into an overarching
concept of markup related to geographical features in general, not just
populated places such as cities, towns, villages, etc. (I myself am
particularly interested in markup for navigation-related information.)
If usefulness to geographers is not the primary concern, something
on the lines of the CIA World Fact Book seems a good idea.

There is a project that has converted the CIA World Fact Book into a
knowledge representation formalism, see

http://ksl-web.stanford.edu/KSL_Abstracts/KSL-98-16.html

that does more or less what Heiko has in mind, I think, though
it did not use in RDF the last time I heard about it

Come  to think of it, the CIA Factbook is on the net too, at:

http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html

and perhaps they're working on RDF markup of place-name
related information?


> By the way, nobody responded so far w.r.t "NameNet". Any WWW-servers
> storing biographic information on people?

Sorry, no information on anything like that...but I see that Simon
has a couple ofusuggestions on thhs too.

Regards,

-- Raphael

rmm@seine.eas.asu.edu
Dept. of Computer Science
Arizona State University

Received on Friday, 21 January 2000 16:06:46 UTC