RE: Schema.org extension for spatial data

Hi Dan, 

Good idea to move this discussion to Github as this would allow the testbed participants to respond themselves, instead of me doing it for them. Do you mean here https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg ?

Linda

-----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
Van: Dan Brickley [mailto:danbri@google.com] 
Verzonden: vrijdag 19 februari 2016 15:03
Aan: Linda van den Brink
CC: public-sdw-wg@w3.org
Onderwerp: Re: Schema.org extension for spatial data

(how could I not un-lurk for this? :)

On 19 February 2016 at 14:23, Linda van den Brink <l.vandenbrink@geonovum.nl> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Within the Geonovum testbed on spatial data on the web we have found 
> that schema.org can help make spatial data discoverable on the web. 
> While working with schema.org we noticed that most of the Things that 
> are described with schema.org are modeled without a dedicated spatial 
> focus in mind. For example the properties that describe "location" are 
> spread over the schema, and the Things that can actually have a location are limited.

Yes, location-related show up all over schema.org. I think this experience is not peculiar to the schema.org project - spatial/geo/location concepts are almost as universal as temporal aspects.

It is certainly true that those aspects of schema.org have not benefited from dedicated professional attention of experts from the geo-spatial domain. The terminology we have today, in part, was inherited via the early inclusion of the rNews vocabulary into schema.org (http://blog.schema.org/2011/09/extended-schemaorg-news-support.html).
rNews in turn had some geo concepts which I think came from http://www.georss.org/ and perhaps originally from GML...  Along the way a few bugs were introduced, some of which have been fixed within schema.org. There also have been efforts (e.g. see last release
http://schema.org/docs/releases.html#v2.2 ) to adapt schema.org's location vocabulary for more mobile services instead of assuming a fixed place-of-work. Previously, for example, you could describe various kinds of http://schema.org/LocalBusiness and their "bricks and mortar" physical location, but if the same services (hairdressing, electrician, locksmith etc.) were mobile, it was harder to describe the areas they could serve.  We therefore added the notion that http://schema.org/Service has a http://schema.org/areaServed property that can be (amongst other things) a http://schema.org/GeoShape such as http://schema.org/GeoCircle . This is still somewhat sketchy, but allows for example a service to be described in terms of a circle's metre radius from some postcode or address. Meanwhile there have also been a few "internet of things"-meets-schema.org conversations, touching on issues like description of rooms within a home or workplace, and their inter-relations, zones/groups etc. We are likely to add a basic notion of room anyway, motivated by  considerations around hotel bookings (see draft proposal at http://sdo-hotels.appspot.com/docs/hotels.html e.g.
sdo-hotels.appspot.com/Room or /HotelRoom ). This is another example of the difficulty of separating spatial concerns from other schema areas.

While schema.org's main use cases mean we'll never go as deep into the spatial as e.g. GML, the project is certainly open to the idea of improvements informed by efforts like this WG, the Geonovum testbed etc.

> The folks (special thanks to Lieke Verhelst) in the testbed developed 
> a proposed extension with the idea to start from scratch. Meaning: it 
> does not propose modifications to the existing schema.org but rather 
> seeks an alternative way to model geo information into schema.org 
> keeping in mind the schema.org modeling objectives.

I'm not sure entirely how to understand "start from scratch", but if the idea is roughly to think through how a schema.org could/should handle these issues, rather than on bugfixes to our current (perhaps
idiosyncratic) approach, that seems a perfectly reasonable and very useful exploration.

>     We refrain from modeling specific constructs that can be used to 
> execute a spatial analysis

Can you give an example of something you have refrained from?

> since 1) there are vocabularies that better support this

(such as?)

> and 2) search engines currently do not seem to be equipped with spatial indexes.

I'm not sure how to interpret this, but most serious search engines have a variety of map/geo/spatial-related associated features and services. How those are implemented internally does not seem especially relevant.

>
> We would be interested very much to get some comments on it from this group!

I'm not sure how much this W3C WG wants to discuss schema.org specifics here in the WG versus in Github but this work looks really interesting and I'll be nudging folk around schema.org to take a look and comment...

Probably the most obvious comment but here goes: it would be great to have a few concrete examples into the repo, particularly around sgeo:coordinates WKT syntax which brings us close to the GeoJSON-LD debates happening nearby. I would also love to get a feeling for whether super-local use cases (e.g. modeling inside a building) are in scope here. Would 'inside', 'next to', 'above' be enough to model a home for any useful purposes? What usecases drive the level of detail here?

cheers,

Dan


> See https://github.com/geo4web-testbed/geo-extension-to-schemaorg

>
>
> Linda

Received on Monday, 22 February 2016 08:30:16 UTC