Re: Are POIs always tangible?

Hello Fons,

Terminology is a slippery thing and we've been struggling with it for
at least a year now if not longer. I think some people's association
with "physical" is that it's an object that they can touch, whereas
your definition of "physical" is "a place in the physical world",
which indeed includes anything with a geographic location.

Although the latter definition is a little less intuitive to me I also
think it is more accurate and more cleanly opposed to purely
conceptual "objects" (for lack of a better term). I still think that
these entities do not fall into our scope (as you also suggest by
calling them a COI rather than a POI) and that we could use linked
data to express these relations between POIs and concepts.

I also like the term of a "beacon" for the "null POI" Thomas proposed,
at least for the use case he put forward.

Regards,

Jens

On Thu, Apr 14, 2011 at 5:45 PM, Fons Kuijk <Fons@w3.org> wrote:
>  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 Friday, 15 April 2011 07:40:07 UTC