Decision needed for issue-38: about different models of spatial things.

Hello,

One UCR issue that really deserves some urgent progress is issue-38
<https://www.w3.org/2015/spatial/track/issues/38>. It is about a possible
new use case and possible new requirements as a result from a submission
from the public. See the thread Additon to use case & new req
<https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-sdw-wg/2016Jan/0093.html>.

The heart of the matter seems to be that people are missing a way to
express that two different sets of data about a real world thing are about
the same real world thing, when the two sets of data use different
information models, one of which could be geospatial. An example is a
building. There could be a batch of data describing the building as a
spatial feature, using spatial semantic standards, and there could be
another batch of data describing the building as a collection of building
materials, using some other semantic standard. The submitters of the
problem feel that there is no way to express that both batches of data are
about the same subject and that the two batches of data could complement
each other. Properties like owl:sameAs
<http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-owl-semantics-20040210/#owl_sameAs>,
rdfs:seeAlso <https://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-schema/#ch_seealso>, umbel:isLike
<http://wiki.opensemanticframework.org/index.php/UMBEL_Vocabulary#isLike_Property>
, bbccore:sameAs <http://www.bbc.co.uk/ontologies/coreconcepts#terms_sameAs>
 and http://schema.org/about are regarded as insufficient  or inappropriate.

The submitters admit that the problem is not in the spatial domain, but
feel that the broader W3C communities have yet failed to address the
problem and that addressing the problem bottom-up, with a clear use case
and with a certain (spatial) scope could lead to a solution that could
later be applied more generally.

I am not sure what we should do. On the one hand I think we should guard
our scope, and not take on things that are really of a broader nature than
spatial data. On the other hand, this is a real world problem that exists
with spatial data and that hinders using combining traditional geospatial
data with other sorts of data. And identifying a requirement is not the
same as promising to meet that requirement.

If we were to accept this use case, I guess the resulting requirement
should be something like "It should be possible to express that spatially
modelled data are about the same subject as data using other information
models". And I guess that would be a BP requirement.

What do you think? How can we resolve this issue?

Regards,
Frans