Re: Censorship?

Just so.

GIS systems decide on a resolution and then do the math.  GIS is a tool for decision making.  It is not a statistical reporting tool though, and if you are not the decision (or policy) maker it's not scholarship, it's art and  I'll grant, good proof of transparency intentions too.

BTW "Censorship" was another thread

--- On Mon, 11/8/10, William Waites <ww@styx.org> wrote:

From: William Waites <ww@styx.org>
Subject: Re: Censorship?
To: "Gannon Dick" <gannon_dick@yahoo.com>
Cc: "Leigh Dodds" <leigh.dodds@talis.com>, "Mike Norton" <xsideofparadise@yahoo.com>, "W3C e-Gov IG" <public-egov-ig@w3.org>
Date: Monday, November 8, 2010, 5:48 PM

On Mon, Nov 08, 2010 at 03:28:12PM -0800, Gannon Dick wrote:
> 
> Latitude and Longitude are a complete coordinate system - the
> ordering is a continuous function.  Entity Names and
> Vocabulary Encoding Schemes form a complete set, something a
> bit different.

If I understand correctly, you see a problem with RDF where
there is no standard way to express things other than points?
Such as lines, polygons, polygons with holes, multipolygons,
geometry collections, the whole suite of shapes that GIS 
systems normally deal with?

If so I think you are partially right. As far as I know there
has been little work done in modelling these sorts of things
in RDF, and I think the triplestores that have even very basic
support for geodata (e.g. points) only support the simplest
of operations with them (e.g. bounding box or radius search).

That said there's no reason you couldn't express more complex
shapes in RDF. The process would be fairly mechanical (e.g.
straightforward translation of WKT, KML or whatever) this
is already a very well understood area.

By far the easiest way to deal with it is just to put WKT
into, e.g. dc:spatial (maybe we need a WKT datatype) and
use any GIS system you like to do the actual indexing. Maybe
add some built-in functions to a SPARQL engine to help with
querying...

Or have I misunderstood completely?

And what does this have to do with censorship?

Cheers,
-w