RE: Linked railway data for the UK

>> http://ontologi.es/rail/stations/gb/MAN.rdf
>> 
>> and wondering if there's some confusion between location and
>> administrative office / postal address.
>> 
>> in the case of piccadilly it's a complex of buildings. the admin
>> office / postal address is in a high rise alongside the actual station
>> and only connected by a covered walkway. hence the vcard of:
>> 
>> <vcard:label xml:lang="en">9th Floor, Piccadilly Tower, Piccadilly
>> station. Manchester M1 2PZ</vcard:label>
>> 
>> which i guess would be more suitable for helicopters than trains :-)

> vCard's label property is defined as "the the formatted text
> corresponding to delivery address of the object the vCard represents",
> so the RDF seems correct to me. If you wanted to have a letter delivered
> to the station, then that's the formatted text that you'd put on the
> envelope.

yup, no quibbles with the vcard

> Perhaps the HTML could be made a little clearer though, and list
> "Address" and "Location" as separate items of data.

would get my vote

>> but the lat, long is given as: 53.4775, -2.2313 which is also the
>> admin building. whereas dbpedia has lat long of 53.477001, -2.230000
>> which is the actual station

> Six decimal places of a degree (as per dbpedia) locates an object rather
> more precisely than is sensible for railway stations which are typically
> rather big constructions (esp. Manchester Piccadilly if I recall
> correctly - I've not been to Manchester in almost 10 years). 0.000001
> latitude is about 1 metre. 0.000001 longitude varies depending on where
> you are on Earth, but in the UK represents about 60 or 70 centimetres.

> If I've given a station's location as ?53.4775, -2.2313 and some part of
> the station lies in the bounding box:

>	?53.47755, -2.23125 ---------- ?53.47755, -2.23135
>	        |                             |
>	        |                             |
>	?53.47745, -2.23125----------- ?53.47745, -2.23135

> then I'm happy.

from a geo perspective does indeed seem good enough. just wonder if there are other unmanned stations in the area that would share the same admin office. i know complaints about my home town station (outside oldham) would be dealt with by the admin office at manchester victoria because the local station has no postal address. depends on how the rest of the data set deals with this sort of thing

>> not sure if there are any stations where the admin office is off site
>> but i guess that's not impossible and might prove problematic in the
>> future?1? anyway, just thought i'd point this out in case it caused
>> any clashing claim problems when trying to mesh up with dbpedia,
>> geonames etc

> My links to geonames were going to be to the city / town / suburb which
> the station serves, but actually there do seem to be a number of railway
> stations listed on geonames.org, so I might try linking up with them
> too.

makes sense

guess my quibble was more with

http://ontologi.es/rail/stations/gb/MAN <owl:sameAs> http://dbpedia.org/resource/Manchester_Piccadilly_station

at first glance the sameAs seemed like too strong an assertion - but i may be wrong here...

the (wiki|db)pedia resource is more about the public perception (for want of better words) of piccadilly station whereas your resource seems to be more about piccadilly station as an admin office

i guess it's the same problem as ordnance survey people struggling to map very precise definitions (administrative areas, county areas, cities) onto the fuzzier dbpedia concepts...



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