Re: Does 'Feature' = 'Real World Thing'?

Hi, Jeremy.

What about "fictional" things? I mean, not only Utopia, Xanadu or
Middle-Earth, but also the London of Dickens, the Paris of Balzac and
Hugo, etc. (and we have also the geography of the Odyssey or of
Dante's Divine Comedy, that were not considered really "fictional" for
quite a few centuries).

I remember that we had a discussion on this in Barcelona, in relation
to spatial data and the humanities [1,2].

Cheers,

Andrea

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[1]http://www.w3.org/2015/spatial/wiki/Minutes_from_Best_Practice_deliverable_group#UC-10:_Enabling_publication.2C_discovery_and_analysis_of_spatiotemporal_data_in_the_humanities_.28Best_Practice.2C_Time.29
[2]http://www.w3.org/2015/spatial/wiki/BP_Requirements#Places_can_be_fictional


On Mon, Oct 19, 2015 at 8:42 AM, Jeremy Tandy <jeremy.tandy@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi-
>
> I've been working through the discussion on Linking-Data and this uncovered
> (or, really, re-found) this issue.
>
> By OGC terminology, Feature is "an abstraction of a real world phenomenon".
> Linked Data folks like to talk about Real World Things (both physical and
> abstract).
>
> There's a disjoint here that we need to resolve.
>
> I've captured the question on the wiki [1] and included the content below.
>
> Jeremy
>
> [1]:
> https://www.w3.org/2015/spatial/wiki/Linking_Data#Question:_is_a_Feature_the_Real_World_Thing.3F
>
> Question: is a Feature the Real World Thing?
>
> ISO 19101 -- Geographic information - Reference model states:
>
> [4.11] feature: abstraction of real world phenomena
> [4.12] feature attribute: characteristic of a feature ...
>
> EXAMPLE 2 A feature attribute named ‘length’ may have an attribute value
> ’82.4’ which belongs to the data type ‘real’.
>
> The definition of feature attribute is clear- it's a piece of information
> about the feature.
>
> feature is not quite so clear. In this context, what does abstraction mean?
>
> Typically, the Linked Data community refer to Real-world ‘Things’ (see
> Designing URI sets for the UK public sector); real-world Things (or just
> Things) are "are the physical and abstract ‘Things’ that may be referred to
> in statements". Examples include a school, a road, a person (physical); a
> government sector, an ethnic group, an event (abstract).
>
> A commonly used example is Manchester Piccadilly Railway Station. A URI for
> Manchester Piccadilly Railway Station would refer to the real station,
> constructed from steel and concrete with thousands of people passing through
> it each day. Clearly one cannot expect an HTTP request to return the real
> railway station (!); it returns an information object about the railway
> station.
>
> W3C URLS in Data (FPWD) discusses the need to differentiate between the real
> Thing and the information resource that describes it. The Publishing Data
> section provides three strategies for doing so.
>
> In the Geographic Community, the Feature is seen as an information resource
> - which is, in some way, related to the real-world Thing. INSPIRE (Generic
> Conceptual Model) refers to these resources as Spatial Objects: "abstract
> representation of a real-world phenomenon related to a specific location or
> geographical area". It notes that the term is "synonymous with "(geographic)
> feature" as used in the ISO 19100 series" and, later, talks about versioning
> the Spatial Objects. Clearly, you can only version the record of information
> held about a real world Thing, not the Thing itself?
>
> So the question remains: are we identifying real-world Things (both physical
> and abstract) or information objects that describe them? Once that's
> decided, we need to get our terminology clear and stick to it!
>
>
>
>



-- 
Andrea Perego, Ph.D.
Scientific / Technical Project Officer
European Commission DG JRC
Institute for Environment & Sustainability
Unit H06 - Digital Earth & Reference Data
Via E. Fermi, 2749 - TP 262
21027 Ispra VA, Italy

https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/

----
The views expressed are purely those of the writer and may
not in any circumstances be regarded as stating an official
position of the European Commission.

Received on Monday, 19 October 2015 08:18:30 UTC