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

It is great that someone recognizes this issue out in the wild. The challenge of dissonant cognition — incommensurate discernment of features — has been a pet project for many years. Boyan Brodaric has approached this in the past through pragmatics - the purpose behind specific discernments — and “hacked” RDF to express it. 

For the purposes of spatial data on the Web, the specific concern may be to indicate when properties of features can be integrated, based on some reconciliation of dissonance. That could be a set of feature / spatial thing relations that indicate to what degree and in what sense there is overlap in the conceptualization and/or location. In the case of building as part collection and building as located structure, it could be both sameLocation and sameMaterial, of example.

I don’t think there is anywhere near a general best practice here, but it wouldn’t hurt to have it as a case for developing (and perhaps later codifying) one.

Josh

> On Jun 22, 2016, at 8:25 AM, 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 <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
> 
>