Re: Censorship?

http://www.w3.org/2010/POI

Chris Beer (iPhone)

On 09/11/2010, at 11:43, Gannon Dick <gannon_dick@yahoo.com> wrote:

> 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
>