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

I can certainly see there is a real use case, and resulting requirement(s)
from this, and while it sits mostly obviously within the BP deliverable my
guess is there is no obvious solution to the issue. So we need to ask
ourselves is it worth going through the process to document all of this
without a potential solution in mind?

I personally think we should as it gives insight to others in terms of
future work... in fact I think a really useful part of the BP deliverable
will be the "stuff we don't know but someone needs to address"

Ed


On Wed, 22 Jun 2016 at 13:26 Frans Knibbe <frans.knibbe@geodan.nl> wrote:

> 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
>
>
> --

*Ed Parsons *FRGS
Geospatial Technologist, Google

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www.edparsons.com @edparsons