Re: State of the Art

Hello Chris,

while I agree it is disputable whether there is something geo specific to
the naming of geo-referenced entities, it should not be overlooked that
there are several areas where there is a need for a standardized geo
vocabulary, namely (to name a few):
 - topological relationships
 - geometry descriptions
 - coordinate systems
 - ... (everyone please complete the list)

Besides, one of the purposes of this group (in my understanding) is not to
reinvent the wheel, but choose among the many wheels already existing and
come to an agreement on the most suitable one in a geo context. Or bridge
them.

my 2c,

--p.


On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 1:46 PM, Chris Beer <chris@codex.net.au> wrote:

> +1 on mergers.
>
> But, at the risk of trivialising, what I actually find even stranger is
> that at the core, geo is really about two numbers (lat,long) or 3 if you
> want to add altitude (and yes, even a polygon is just a container of
> coordinates)- its not really semantic. Yet we see a lot of effort going
> into this nowadays.
>
> What IS semantic is the context or meaning people assign to those
> coordinates - I call a country  Burma, you call it Myanmar. I call where I
> am "home", you call it Block and Section x and cadastre #y. To you another
> place is a postal address, to me it's a geoIP location of a user. And yet I
> receive looks of horror from GIS pros when I tell them I'm running an
> enterprise government mapping system with nothing more than Tilestache,
> Open Layers and Drupal, where location is just a type of content I can
> assign a geocode to and put it on a map - because the coordinate doesn't
> change, just how I describe the thing that is there.
>
> I, with one foot in the Geospatial community, and other limbs and fingers
> being in the web, data management, LOD, metadata, cartography and
> visualisation, to name a few, cannot help but note that while the GIS
> community really know their stuff, they often lack the "people" focus of
> the SemWeb community - I still argue with my father the town planner and
> surveyor for instance that no one but his profession and the stats crowd
> call a home a "dwelling" and ones hometown a "population centre".
>
> I'd strongly urge the spatial crowd to reach out to other professions who
> specialise in looking at how people view the world around them and work
> along side them - why reinvent the wheel when all it takes is just
>
> a) plugging a geocode (in an OGC standards compliant manner of course)
> into a semantic reference, and;
>
> b) realising that GIS is already linked data and ready to be triplified so
> easily.
>
> [latlong] [hasContext] [placeA]
>                  [hasContext] [placeB]
>                  [hasContext] [placeN...]
>
> What SemWeb and LOD need from the Geo crowd more than anything IMO is
> standardised spatial systems for us to reference - for instance, accurate
> high res maps at low levels, more geocoded datasets, more open source
> tools, standardised map icons, and more of all of it :)
>
> Cheers
>
> Chris
>
>
> Sent from my ASUS Eee Pad
>
> John Goodwin <John.Goodwin@ordnancesurvey.co.uk> wrote:
>
> >>> sigh, pity they set up a new one instead of joining the existing one.
> >>> Looks like history is repeating itself when it comes to geospatial data
> >>> on the (Semantic) Web.
> >>>
> >>> +1 for a merge if the goals are similar.
> >>
> >> +1 as well. We (EURECOM) are member of both community groups.
> >
> >Another +1. I wasn't aware of the other group until I saw it hear and it
> does seem daft having two groups presumably trying to address the same
> issues..
> >
> >John
> >
> >Dr John Goodwin
> >Senior Research Scientist
> >Research, Ordnance Survey
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