RE: Difference between W3C Basic Geo "spatial thing" and sdwgeo "spatial thing"

Yes – the w3.org badge has a lot of trust associated.

We also hit this with nasa.gov around the SWEET ontologies, the early versions of which had some very rough spots, and is still very very poorly documented. But people trust NASA.

FOAF is a counter-example. It didn’t have a big organizational affiliation to lead people there, but did have the DanBri brand. But more significantly it scratched an itch and seemed like it was going to hang around.

Simon

From: Dan Brickley [mailto:danbri@google.com]
Sent: Friday, 2 September 2016 8:07 AM
To: Jeremy Tandy <jeremy.tandy@gmail.com>
Cc: Joshua Lieberman <jlieberman@tumblingwalls.com>; SDW WG Public List <public-sdw-wg@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Difference between W3C Basic Geo "spatial thing" and sdwgeo "spatial thing"

I'm not sure when the RDFIG/SWIG basic geo SpatialThing vocabulary started to be taken so seriously!

https://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/ and https://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos were just a bunch of us from the W3C RDF IG / Semweb IG collaborating in a few IRC chats, as a result of our having noticed that a lot of us had made up similar-looking RDF schemas that defined lat/long-related properties. The main lesson from that exercise was that people will adopt something and assume it has had careful review, merely because it is on w3.org<http://w3.org>. It took quite a while (~3 years!) before someone noticed that we defined an 'alt' property without saying what it means. Please don't tie yourself in knots trying to coordinate with it; instead consider any modest improvements we could make to its documentation (including pointers to later work from this group or elsewhere).

Dan