Re: [dxwg] Add support for spatial resolution specification via skos:ConceptScheme (#1263)

We'd also like to see this added.

Specifying resolution in metres only really makes sense for data collected on a continuous distance scale (like sampling points), not nominal coding (like we have with administrative geography).

We could express the resolution in metres using e.g the average radius of geometric polygons but the variance would be far too high (e.g. country-level resolution would include distances on the scale of both Luxembourg and Russia).

Instead it's more meaningful to talk about the units into which the data is aggregated to calculate the statistics.

Coincidentally we came up with the same idea independently!

```turtle
:spatialResolution a owl:DatatypeProperty, rdf:Property ;
  rdfs:subPropertyOf dcterms:spatial ;
  rdfs:domain dcat:Dataset ;
  rdfs:label "Spatial Resolution" ;
  rdfs:comment "The granularity of geographic areas covered by the data."@en ;
  skos:scopeNote "The range has a nominal type which is more appropriate for statistical data collection than the continuous distance scale provided by dcat:SpatialResolutionInMetres."@en ;
  rdfs:range :SpatialResolution ;
  rdfs:seeAlso dcat:spatialResolutionInMeters ;
  .

:SpatialResolution a rdfs:Class;
  rdfs:label "Spatial Resolution";
  rdfs:comment "The level of spatial resolution."@en ;
  .
```

The key difference from the [above proposal](https://github.com/w3c/dxwg/issues/1263#issuecomment-832425727) is that we aren't using `skos:Concept` for the range and instead introduce a `:SpatialResolution` class.

This would be more like `dct:Location` (the range of `dct:spatial`) which can be described spatially with a `dcat:bbox` or nominally with a `locn:geographicName`.

We didn't use `skos:Concept` because our geographies themselves are already `skos:Concept`s. You'd need something to distinguish geography-concepts from geography-level-concepts and a property to attach the latter to the former.

For unrelated reasons we've found it necessary to identify a `:ConceptLevel` class and I think it suits this purpose reasonably well too.

<details>
  <summary>Why Concept Level?</summary>

  The `:ConceptLevel` arose in the context of [English administrative geography](https://www.ons.gov.uk/methodology/geography/ukgeographies/administrativegeography/england) where there's not a single ordered set of levels which meant that we couldn't use `xkos:levels`/ `xkos:ClassificationLevel`.
</details>

We have:

```turtle
:Country rdfs:subClassOf :ConceptLevel .
:NUTS1 rdfs:subClassOf :ConceptLevel .

<http://data.europa.eu/nuts/code/UK> a skos:Concept, :Country;
  skos:narrower <http://data.europa.eu/nuts/code/UKD> .

<http://data.europa.eu/nuts/code/UKD> a skos:Concept, :NUTS1;
  skos:broader <http://data.europa.eu/nuts/code/UK> .
```

Thus we could have:

```turtle
:national_output_dataset :spatialResolution :Country .
:regional_output_dataset :spatialResolution :NUTS1 .

# and so by inference...
:Country a :SpatialResolution .
:NUTS1 a :SpatialResolution .
```


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Received on Wednesday, 16 June 2021 08:36:26 UTC