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

Hi,

   I have been working on a more extreme solution.  I have been 
considering how to build an index for the massive amount of text in 
collections of digitized historical newspapers.  Such collections are 
full of narrative and causation and I believe those are not easily 
modeled without an explicit representation of state.  Does every event 
that is described in a newspaper lead to a new "Period"?  Thus, I have 
proposed models based on programming languages.  Specifically, because 
we want to associate actions (also processes, norms, activities) with 
specific entities (i.e., we want to treat them as systems), I believe we 
need object-oriented languages.

Allen, R.B., Frame-based Models of Communities and their 
History./Histoinformatics/, Nov 2013, Kyoto. LNCS 8359, 110-119,PDF 
<http://boballen.info/RBA/PAPERS/HISTOINFORMATICS2013/Allen_Histo_2013.pdf>
Allen, R.B., Model-Oriented Information Organization: Part 1, The 
Entity-Event Fabric,/D-Lib Magazine/, July  
2013.DLIB,<http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july13/allen/07allen-pt1.html>DOI<http://doi.org/10.1045/july2013-allen-pt1>
Allen, R.B., Model-Oriented Information Organization: Part 2, Discourse 
Relationships,/D-Lib Magazine/, July 
2013.DLIB,<http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july13/allen/07allen-pt2.html>DOI 
<http://doi.org/10.1045/july2013-allen-pt2>
Allen, R.B., Visualization, Causation, and History,/iConference/, 
2011,PDF<http://boballen.info/RBA/PAPERS/ICONF2011/VCH.pdf>,ACM<http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1940835&CFID=9840151&CFTOKEN=80042112>,DOI 
<http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1940761.1940835>
Allen, R. B. and Acheson, J. A., Browsing the Structure of Multimedia 
Stories,/ACM Digital Libraries/San Antonio, TX, June, 2000, 11-18.PDF 
<http://boballen.info/RBA/PAPERS/NARRATIVES/narrative.pdf>,ACM,<http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/336597.336615>DOI 
<http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/336597.336615>

Bob Allen
http://boballen.info/


On 3/30/2014 8:26 AM, Richard Light wrote:
>
> 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*