RE: BP & SSN: feature of interest vs spatial thing

Please note that 'Feature' was never an O&M (ISO 19156) concept per se. It comes from the ISO 19101 Reference Model.

The relevant terms in the O&M spec were

-          A property (rolename) 'featureOfInterest' to link an Observation to the thing whose property-value is being estimated

-          A Class GFI_Feature, which is an instantiation of the meta-class GF_Feature, taken from ISO 19109.

The name of the property feature-of-interest was a topic of considerable discussion during the development of O&M. It was originally called 'target' but this was changed in discussions around 2005 at the specific request of some of the project sponsors, whose affiliation with the D&I industry and community made them a little sensitive around that term ...

"feature-of-interest" was chosen to align with the 19101 terminology, but seems to have stood up well in consultations with many communities.

Simon

From: Kerry Taylor [mailto:kerry.taylor@anu.edu.au]
Sent: Sunday, 26 February, 2017 16:36
To: public-sdw-wg@w3.org
Subject: BP & SSN: feature of interest vs spatial thing

SDWers,
I note that BP has moved away from the O&M concept of "feature" towards "spatial thing" instead - yet in SSN we are using  O&M's  "Feature of Interest " with the following 2 descriptions:

(1) sosa:FeatureOfInterest:  "The thing whose property is being estimated or calculated in the course of an Observation to arrive at a Result or whose property is being manipulated by an Actuator"
AND

(2) Ssn:FeatureOfInterest: "A feature is an abstraction of real world phenomena (thing, person,  event, etc)".

Formally, ssn traditionally defined it simply as an Event or Object.

What do those in the BP space think about this? In ssn I don't think we even care whether the thing being observed  has a geometry, but indeed "Feature" used in the context of ssn inherits all the same problems that the BP documents. Should we use "Spatial thing" as a way of lining up with BP?

A short extract from current BP draft follows:

To avoid confusion, we adopt the term "spatial thing<http://w3c.github.io/sdw/bp/#dfn-spatial-thing>" throughout the remainder of this best practice document. "Spatial thing<http://w3c.github.io/sdw/bp/#dfn-spatial-thing>" is defined in [W3C-BASIC-GEO<http://w3c.github.io/sdw/bp/#bib-W3C-BASIC-GEO>] as "Anything with spatial extent, i.e. size, shape, or position. e.g. people, places, bowling balls, as well as abstract areas like cubes".

The concept of "spatial thing<http://w3c.github.io/sdw/bp/#dfn-spatial-thing>" is considered to include both "real-world phenomena" and their abstractions (e.g. "feature<http://w3c.github.io/sdw/bp/#dfn-feature>" as defined in [ISO-19101<http://w3c.github.io/sdw/bp/#bib-ISO-19101>]). Furthermore, we treat it as inclusive of other commonly used definitions; e.g. Feature from [NeoGeo<http://w3c.github.io/sdw/bp/#bib-NeoGeo>], described as "A geographical feature, capable of holding spatial relations"........
Looking more closely, it is important to note that geometry is typically a property of a spatial thing<http://w3c.github.io/sdw/bp/#dfn-spatial-thing>.

-Kerry