Summary for Extending geo for Areas with a Radius, Test Vocabulary and Sample RDF

After reviewing the feedback I created a test vocabulary and RDF file.

The test vocabulary is in it's own namespace and called dwc_area.

It is here: http://lod.taxonconcept.org/ontology/dwc_area.owl

The HTML Document is here
http://lod.taxonconcept.org/ontology/dwc_area_doc/index.html (For some
reason protege did not include the imported geo vocabulary)

I also made up a small test file that uses both the new geo URI and an shows
the suggested way to include a radius measure.

It is here: http://lod.taxonconcept.org/rdf/area_example.rdf

It should show up in Sindice soon, and already works in URIburner.
(I did submit an earlier incorrect earlier version into Sindice that might
still be cached)

Here is what the RDF looks like in URIBurner

<
http://linkeddata.uriburner.com/about/html/http/lod.taxonconcept.org/rdf/area_example.rdf
 >

To get to each of the three "Areas" you need to click on the links in the *
topics* list

** Note that the final location of the vocabulary is unclear. It will
probably end up in the DarwinCore vocabular or in my txn vocabulary.*
** It might also make sense to keep it a separate?*

# Below is background info and the suggestions from the LOD community.

1)
There is proposed standard that everyone should know about
*A Uniform Resource Identifier for Geographic Locations ('geo' URI)*
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5870 (from Sean Gillies)

* Not clear that all the systems understand this but URIburner and Virtuoso
interprets these as a "URN" type thing, so they work, but are not
"understood" in the way that the "geo" vocabulary is understood. Note that
if and when this becomes a standard it will allow these "Areas" to be
universally understood. What this means is that in the future I can markup
my 10,0000 mosquito records from one location with one URN type id.

2)
I got the following back from Bernard Vatan.

> What about something as the following, since the radius is not really a
property of the point ... * Note this differs from my final examples

<dwc:Area>
    <geo:center>
        <geo:Point>
            <geo:lat>55.701</geo:lat>
            <geo:long>12.552</geo:long>
        </geo:Point>
    </geo:center>
    <dwc:radius>10</dwc:radius>
</dwc:Area>

3)
I also got this back from Paul Houle,

> For Ookaboo I've worked out an internal data model for points;  Ookaboo
also knows about real shapes,  but the fact is that most people out there
will throw points at you and only know how to consume points.
> Here are a few bits of extra data that are useful to add to a point

> (1) provenance
> (2) datum (I try to stick to WGS84,  but points from freebase occasionally
have a Datum attached,  so I store it)
> (3) circular error (the accuracy of the determination of the point,  for
instance the technical limitation of a GPS receiver)
> (4) scale length of feature (how accurate do we have to be?  it's not
worth getting into an edit war over the exact point that represents,  say,
 Finland.)
> (5) an overall quality rating (so if we've got ten points we can pick the
best)

# I am looking forward to comments and suggestions.

Respectfully,

- Pete
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Pete DeVries
Department of Entomology
University of Wisconsin - Madison
445 Russell Laboratories
1630 Linden Drive
Madison, WI 53706
TaxonConcept Knowledge Base <http://www.taxonconcept.org/> / GeoSpecies
Knowledge Base <http://lod.geospecies.org/>
About the GeoSpecies Knowledge Base <http://about.geospecies.org/>
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