Re: [foaf-dev] FOAF, geonames, and more

dear Alexandre,
On Fri, Jan 26, 2007 at 05:07:06PM +0100, Alexandre Passant wrote:
> I'm currently looking for ways to link things (especially foaf:Agents)
> to geonames [1] defined entities (since it provides not only lat/long
> info but also useful things as wikipedia entry, neighbour places ...).

This sounds like an interesting and fun project. I would be wary of
over-relying on geonames.org - the US mil/gov/int data from which is it
derived can be very inaccurate in places and have names which are locally
meaningless sometimes. Though geonames are refining and fixing it slowly...

> I'll be happy to get feedback about these ideas.

I can offer you pointers to prior art as i'm a bit short of screentime

http://esw.w3.org/topic/GeoInfo has a ton of biscuit trails to it on
vocabs/use cases. there was a 'pim' personal info management ns that defined 
a 'near' property and also a lot of use of the 'cyc:near' property.
i guess foaf:based_near sort of superseded that. There are so many
subtleties once you start to get into the spatial ontology side ("does
a point really exist? is time relative? OMG, what am i sitting on?")
that being usefully vague is about the most you can hope for :)

I wrote a "mapping FOAF networks" piece in "Mapping Hacks" which
probably says most of the same things, it might be worth you looking
at if you run across a copy, or i might be able to dig out the
original word file. Jim Ley did a lot of stuff using 'nearest airport'
as a predicate and you can get a surprisingly long way to
interestingness with that. I move so much, i need a bot to remind me
where i am.

best luck,


jo

Received on Monday, 29 January 2007 12:03:01 UTC