Re: State of the Art

Hello Chris,

> 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.

... because it is a bit more complex than this :-) As Philippe said, if 
you start to talk about lat/long, you assume a coordinate systems (and 
you probably assume WGS84). Sadly, there are tons of coordinate systems, 
and good reasons to have many and you might want to declaratively say 
which one you use and how to project from one to the other, etc. Second, 
there are geometries, which in some use cases can be represented as a 
container of coordinates, but in some other use cases, need to have a 
bit more structure and semantics, because part of geometries are shared, 
etc.

For the rest, I agree with what you said, and clearly the GIS and SW 
community need to talk to each other more, but I see those (hopefully 
merged) groups the perfect occasion for doing this.

   Raphaël

-- 
Raphaël Troncy
EURECOM, Campus SophiaTech
Multimedia Communications Department
450 route des Chappes, 06410 Biot, France.
e-mail: raphael.troncy@eurecom.fr & raphael.troncy@gmail.com
Tel: +33 (0)4 - 9300 8242
Fax: +33 (0)4 - 9000 8200
Web: http://www.eurecom.fr/~troncy/

Received on Wednesday, 9 January 2013 15:59:38 UTC