Re: ISA Core Location Vocabulary

On Mon, Dec 23, 2013 at 12:36 PM, Frans Knibbe | Geodan <
frans.knibbe@geodan.nl> wrote:

>  Hello Andrea,
>
> It is nice to know that the JRC is seriously researching Linked Data for
> INSPIRE. Are you also trying to coordinate the different EU activities? Or
> could we expect some kind of shared repository of INSPIRE RDF vocabularies?
> Creating ontologies based on specifications of INSPIRE themes is a lot of
> work, so it would be a pity if many people or organisations are doing that
> independently.
>

(Wearing my JRC hat now...) This is exactly one of the motivations behind
such activity. The first objective is not to create "official" RDF
vocabularies for INSPIRE, but rather methodologies for their definition, to
be agreed upon within the INSPIRE community. The next steps will depend on
the outcome of such work. This includes the possibility of following a
collaborative approach to the creation of RDF vocabularies for INSPIRE.


> That brings me to another question: Let us assume that in the near future
> there will be full-fledged vocabularies for each of the INSPIRE themes, and
> for the basic semantics that are shared between the themes. What would then
> be the purpose of the Location Core vocabulary? Not only geometry would be
> defined externally, but geographical names and addresses too.
>

I think this is something to be decided by the LOCADD CG.

As I mentioned earlier in this thread, originally, the LOCN voc was meant
to be a "core" vocabulary to support cross-sector interoperability on
location information. Which also means that it can be extended depending on
the requirements of each specific sector, by defining appropriate profiles.
An external and INSPIRE-compliant definition of notions like "geographical
names" and "addresses" would be consistent with this approach. Of course,
INSPIRE vocabularies may re-use and/or extend what is already defined in
the LOCN voc (e.g., locn:Address, which is modelled on the INSPIRE
AddressRepresentation datatype).

So, the question is whether the LOCN voc should be still considered as a
"core" vocabulary, or it should evolve otherwise.

Personally, I would be in favour of a design strategy that would allow a
wide re-use of the LOCN voc, not only limited to INSPIRE, and possibly also
outside Europe.

Cheers,

Andrea