Re: GeoNames and Spatial Queries

On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 10:59 AM, Kingsley Idehen
<kidehen@openlinksw.com> wrote:
>
>> My worry as a mashup author is that the web of linked data
>> has holes in places I didn't expect, and navigating across the
>> gaps requires traditional integration code.
>
> No DBMS is perfect for cognition gifted humans. The Linked Data Web is no
> exception. Their are two many dimensions to human context :-)
>

Fair enough, but location is a very important dimension. At
least to me :-) The fact that all the major relational databases
have positional SQL queries is a sign that it's an important
dimension to other people, as well...


> You are really seeking a URI that expose a Thing with geospatial object
> association, right? Thus, when you put the URI in a browser you get a map of
> those things etc..
>

Hmmm. I have a lat/long position (given to me by the phone),
and I want the top 3 closest US National Register sites ranked by
proximity. And I want to get those sites using linked data as
"purely" as possible, obeying all relevant best practices.

I have the National Register dataset locally. Part of the exercise
was to publish it as linked data. I was tentatively planning to use
geonames URLs for locations. (The National Register dataset is
also available as part of other datasets, but the idea was to
actually go through the exercise)

So, if I have lat/long, and a National Register dataset that links
to the geonames dataset that has lat/long data, then all the data
I need is available as linked data.

But... I have no (generic) way to state my query.

As far as I can tell, my options are:

 A) Write integration code to hook the datasets (geonames has
 a couple queries I could use), with the option of wrapping the
 bridge so it could be queried via a SPARQL extension.

 B) Import the geonames data locally, and either use postgreSQL
 geodata extensions directly, or wrap them so I could query
 locally via a SPARQL extension.


> Are the following ample examples:
>
> 1. Display a map of places associated with battles linked to "Naploleon"
> 2. Geospatial browsing along the lines of: http://linkedgeodata.org/browser/
>

Number 1 would probably be closest.

It looks like the linkedgeodata browser takes option (B) above,
but of course at that point you're limited to datasets that you've
pre-imported or pre-coded an integration for, and you've lost the
ability to _generically_ link in new data.

Which is fine. The whole idea was to learn by writing an actual
application, and problems encountered along the way are just
grist for the blog mill.

Thanks for the feedback!

-cks

-- 
Christopher St. John
http://praxisbridge.com

Received on Thursday, 26 February 2009 19:36:25 UTC