Re: 'area profiles' - use case for back links

I don't have a strong feeling about this and agree it is a more general problem than just spatial. We could perhaps identify a good solution, perhaps one from another domain, and list this in our best practices. Maybe the data on the web group has something to say on the issue?



> On 5 Aug 2015, at 15:53, Kerry Taylor <Kerry.Taylor@acm.org> wrote:
> 
> frans,
> I suppose because the "linking", including "backlinks" , is a major( the major?) reason for our existence....and a serious missing element in existing standards for spatial data publishing/ consuming. Does that argument stand up?
> Kerry
> 
> 
> 
>> On 6 Aug 2015, at 12:38 am, Frans Knibbe <frans.knibbe@geodan.nl> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 2015-08-05 16:08 GMT+02:00 Kerry Taylor <Kerry.Taylor@acm.org>:
>>> Bill,
>>> This seems to me to be a use case we need, that is kind-of there in a few  use cases but not so explicit as you have described it here ( although you have included some solution suggestions). Can you put it on the use case page on the wiki as a starting point to processing it further?
>>> @Frans, @Alejandro, would that be appropriate?
>> 
>> Yes, I think it would.  
>>> 
>>> This is not really specific to "spatial" linking but I do think it is something we should specifically address nevertheless...
>> 
>> That was my initial thought too: backlinking is an understandable requirement, but I don't see how it fits within our scope. Why do you think we should address it nevertheless? It would be nice if we can discover the spatialness of the matter.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> Frans
>> 
>>> 
>>> Kerry
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> On 5 Aug 2015, at 10:32 pm, Bill Roberts <bill@swirrl.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Hi all
>>>> 
>>>> In last week's call I mentioned a use case for 'back links' to places - the question of what resources are linked to my location of interest, or in RDF terminology, which triples exist with my location as the object.  Something that comes up frequently in our work for local government is 'area profiles' - selecting and presenting data about a place.  The data typically covers topics like demographics, health, economy, environment etc. and in our work is usually represented as statistical data in linked data form, using the RDF Data Cube vocabulary.  The RDF links generally go from an 'observation' to the place.
>>>> 
>>>> The area profile usually this incorporates some kind of simple map of the place, plus simple charts of selected data.  See http://profiles.hampshirehub.net/profiles/E06000045 for an example
>>>> 
>>>> This is straightforward in principle if all the available data is in a single database - you can retrieve the things you want by SPARQL query.  A more general and challenging problem is to answer a user question along the lines of 'what data is available about location X' drawing from distributed data sources.  A practical solution to that would generally involve some manual discovery and integration - becoming aware through various means of the existence of a relevant data collection (by web search, or personal recommendation, or social media or whatever), deciding if it holds info about a place then adding it to a list of services that could be queried to pull back the data.
>>>> 
>>>> Sometimes this could be more complicated if we are interested not only in data that links directly to our place identifier, but to related identifiers (other names for same thing, a sub-area or super-area of the place in question etc).
>>>> 
>>>> The challenge in question is one of discovery.  The most practical solution might be 'just google it' (having allowed search engines to crawl the data collections).  Perhaps more targeted indexes for specific domains of interest could meet the same need with less noise.  Querying metadata of data catalogues might be another option.
>>>> 
>>>> Best regards
>>>> 
>>>> Bill
>> 
>> 
>> 
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>> Frans Knibbe
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