Re: TGN place types (broader/narrower spanning ConceptSchemes)

Hi,

I agree with Oreste that we need to model the time dimension.

In your paper, you say early on that

·Place types have *Historic Info*: Historic flag, Start Date, End Date, 
and Comment (display date).

Surely that's wrong: the types don't /of themselves/ have these 
properties; it is only in the context of a specific place (like 
Machupicchu) that these properties of place types are meaningful.

So, it follows that the relationship between a place and a specified 
place type can't be a simple "has type" property, linking place and 
place type. If you do that, there is nowhere to hang these additional 
place type properties (a classic problem with simplistic RDF).  Instead, 
the relationship could be defined in the context of something like a 
CIDOC CRM E4 Period ("coherent phenomena or cultural manifestations 
bounded in time and space").  This E4 Period could have a type meaning 
"place having type".

Once this aspect is modelled in this way, I don't see how the "broader" 
relationships between place types impact on the "broader" relationships 
between the place instances themselves.

Richard

On 29/03/2014 10:30, Oreste Signore wrote:
> As the leader of the pilot project that led to TGN (yeah, it was 25 
> years ago) I have something to say about the approach.
> To my understanding, and this was one of the main issues from the 
> pilot project, the representation of historical place names (and the 
> relative falls_within or similar) does not fit well in a theasaurus 
> structure.
> At the time, we talked about "database structure" while today we can 
> talk about "ontologies" ;-) .
> The relationships are modeling time-dependent features, and:
>
> tgn:7018759-concept a skos:Concept;
>
> foaf:focus tgn:7018759-place;
>
> skos:prefLabel "Sofiya-Grad";
>
> gvp:broaderPartitive tgn:7006413-concept; # Bulgaria
>
>
> represent the present status (ignoring anyway any intermediate 
> administrative level).
> What about Crimea today or one month ago? (just to recall very recent 
> events).
>
> In other words, we are loosing the "time dimension"
>
> I think that perhaps names could be represented taking advantage from 
> all the well known features of SKOS (just multilingualism support 
> would be enough), while other aspects should be handled at a richer 
> and more sophisticated ontological level.
>
> To move towards a real LOD environment, we should consider "Changes" 
> and "Events" which cause changes.
>
> If this can help, you can see a recent work on this issues, I'm just 
> working on a project for historical name places (nice to come back 25 
> years!)
> Please find the references:
> - the paper: 
> http://www.weblab.isti.cnr.it/papers/public/ch2013-Athens-Signore-paper.pdf
> - the slides: 
> http://www.weblab.isti.cnr.it/papers/public/ch2013-Athens-Signore-slides.pdf
>
> Best
> oreste
>
>
> On 28/03/2014 18:48, Vladimir Alexiev wrote:
>> Hi all!
>>
>> In preparation for TGN LOD publication, we have an important question:
>> how to represent the relation between Place and Place Type.
>> Please read the attached document (which is also posed to the GVP external reviewers) and comment here.
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>
> -- 
> dott. Oreste Signore
> CNR-ISTI
> cell. +39-348-3962627
> Skype: orestesignore
> home page:http://www.weblab.isti.cnr.it/people/oreste/

-- 
*Richard Light*