Re: Are POIs always tangible?

  Hi all,

Let's try to get a consistent terminology first and make proper 
distinctions.
What is a non-physical POI?
To me any POI that has a geographical location is physical, so "the place
were Lee Harvey Oswald was shot" is a physical POI to me, it is even 
tangible
in a sense, because you can step on it with your feet.
It may not have a visible entity that indicates the event that occurred 
there
years ago, but does that make it non-physical? Not for me.
The North-Pole is similar, nothing to be seen, yet it is there for sure
and as physical and tangible as you can get.

For me a non-physical POI does not even exist, since if it cannot be related
to a location (for instance referring to the brand "Starbucks" rather than
referring to the POI that relates to a coffee-shop located in Regent Street)
I would rather consider it to be a COI (Concept of Interest, to give it 
a name)
that if needed can be included in the metadata of a POI.

A "null" POI as Thomas states that serves as a beacon for relative
positioning of other POIs is legitimate, but for its purpose at least 
needs a
location, hence is physical.

Fons


On 14-04-11 15:47, Jens de Smit wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm with Thomas here that if we want to specify elaborate about the
> nature of a POI, such as which brand it belongs to, we should look at
> using linked data.
>
> A non-physical POI is useful for use cases such as "the place where
> Lee Harvey Oswald was shot". However, Andy posted a second
> qualification for a conceptual POI, namely something that does not
> have a geographical location. I don't see a use case for that yet, but
> please surprise me :)
>
> Jens
>
> On Thu, Apr 14, 2011 at 3:01 PM, Thomas Wrobel<darkflame@gmail.com>  wrote:
>> POIs should certainly not have to be tangable - even "null" POIs would
>> have their uses as other POIs could be positioned relative to them,
>> making it easy to stuff to be moved/updated together.
>>
>> Likewise many non-physical unity's or even concepts could be a POI
>> provided they have some sort of meaningful real world location(s).
>>
>> I'm not keen, however, on the idea of going to far into contact
>> details/buisness/chain stuff...the idea aof a "parent" of a branch of
>> a store being the business franchise is completely different to the
>> idea of POI having a physical locational relationship with another.
>> (ie,  poster POI might be positioned relatively to the bus it is on).
>>
>> While the first idea of "parent" is indeed usefull from a search
>> perspective, it should be dealt with by existing semantic search and
>> linked data solutions - as long as the POI stores metadata about it
>> being a "starbucks", then its semantic relationship should be pulled
>> from databases elsewhere without needing the POI standard to define
>> business details at all.
>>

Received on Thursday, 14 April 2011 16:04:06 UTC