Re: Geo in RDF (was Re: Censorship?)

--- On Mon, 11/15/10, Stuart Williams <skw@epimorphics.com> wrote:


> What I am looking for is a *widely* adopted practice,
> preferably backed/endorsed by a defacto or de-jure standards
> organization. I don't think I have found such a beast except
> for the case of Point positions expressed as WGS 84 lat/long
> in which case there is widespread community practice in the
> use of the "Basic Geo (WGS84 lat/long) Vocabulary" [a].
> [a] http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/

I don't believe there is any widely adopted practice, but for reasons unrelated to present subject.  In the Commercial world, the origin of the data is part of the "product" value, and the destination is promiscuous (the data is for sale to anyone).  You cannot ascertain Locations or Identifiers under those circumstances.  Government Open Data differs.  There is an enumerable list of origins, although (hopefully) the destinations remain promiscuous.

> I think Gannon was making a point about localized
> re-invention of vocabulary either being inevitable or maybe
> accidental - either way it mitigates against the widespread
> adoption of a common practice and potentially linits the
> reuse of data assets published using a particular local
> practice. It also mitigates against tooling, developing to
> support such things as spatial-indexes in SPARQL stores,
> because without the use of common vocabularies you loose the
> triggers that would induce index building - and responsive
> UIs seeking to display artefacts within spatial bounding
> boxes could well do with the help a spatial index could
> give.

Something like that.  If you have a fully enumerated set of data origins (possible for Governments, unnecessary in Business), they must be collated to the same precision when linked.  This is not a problem in the Commercial World, you simply hope that your accountants are smart enough not to throw away any extra money they come across.  Generally, they are :o)

I made the fully enumerated data sets for Spain (all Autonomous Communities) and Albacete Province and will post them tomorrow.

--Gannon

Received on Monday, 15 November 2010 22:44:58 UTC