Re: ISA Core Location Vocabulary

Thanks, Frans.

Please see my comments inline.

On Fri, Dec 20, 2013 at 12:31 PM, Frans Knibbe | Geodan <
frans.knibbe@geodan.nl> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Thank you for the notification. I was aware of the vocabulary, but it is
> good to  know that it is now out of the hands of the ISA programme and in
> our custody.
>
> What I think is particularly interesting about this vocabulary is that its
> goal is to provide interoperability with INSPIRE. Does this mean the JRC
> and/or INSPIRE are seriously looking into using Linked Data as an
> alternative to ISO191xx? That would be thrilling! Have there already been
> attempts to recode INSPIRE themes as RDF vocabularies?
>

Actually, yes. There's work planned for next year on this, but, as I guess
you know, several organisations and projects in the EU are already active
on how to use Linked Data in INSPIRE.


> I recognize the terms from the INSPIRE themes, but I also notice that
> semantic interoperability is not complete. Take for example the
> geographical name. In INSPIRE it is a complex class, but although its data
> type is not defined in the vocabulary, it seems that the concept is reduced
> to a single text string.
>

This was in version 1.00. In the current one, the range of
locn:geographicName is intentionally undefined.

About why there is no class for geographical names, please take into
account that the purpose of this vocabulary was to define just a small set
of terms that could be used across sectors of the public administration to
support interoperability. Differently from the notion of "address", there
was no use case requiring a more detailed definition of geographical names,
so it was let undefined.

Of course, we can work on this, if the LOCADD CG thinks otherwise.


> A completely different thing: I see that the Location Core Vocabulary does
> not define a new way of encoding geometry, but rather permits the encoding
> specified in GeoSPARQL and Basic Geo. Was NeoGeo ever considered too? One
> consideration may be that the world at large will not be helped by having
> many different encodings for geometry. I think I would prefer just an
> encoding of WKT, but without including the (URI of) the coordinate
> reference system (CRS). I believe the SRS should be a separate entity, to
> be applicable to a geometry, to a collection of geometries, or to a dataset.
>

Thanks for introducing this issue, Frans. On this, please see my reply to
Ghislain's mail.

Cheers,

Andrea