Re: Spatial ontology for geographic information

Bonjour Jean

I would be very happy to investigate interoperability of ISO/TC 211 
models with Geonames ontology, currently under revision 
(http://www.geonames.org/ontology).
Geonames is more and more used as a reference data set for Semantic Web 
Linked Data applications (http://linkeddata.org).

Unfortunately, ISO has not had so far any policy of open publication of 
schemas on the Web, although the Semantic Web needs stable and reliable 
URIs for many things codified by ISO, say for examples countries and 
languages. Geonames publishes URIs for countries, URIs for languages are 
published at http://www.lingvoj.org, and DBpedia has URIs for both 
countries and languages. But one would hope that at some point ISO 
itself publishes URIs for such codes in its own namespace ...

A first step in "sharing with the Semantic Web" would be to have those 
schemas you are speaking about freely available on the Web. :-)
Do you intend to have whatever ontologies developed in your project 
framework schemas deployed on the Web following Semantic Web open 
publication practices, or as usual ISO publication (pay for download 
documents)?

Bernard

Brodeur, Jean a écrit :
> Hello,
> ISO/TC 211 (http://www.isotc211.org/) is the ISO technical committe 
> responsible for the development of international standards in 
> geographic information. As part of the standardization work, a 
> comprehensive set of geospatial concepts has been developed in UML for 
> the description of spatial data, temporal data, metadata, geographic 
> feature, and more.
> Under this technical committee, I am leading a project team (PT19150) 
> which has the mandate to conduct a study about the use of ontologies 
> and Semantic Web for the pupose on interoperability of geographic 
> information. As part of this study, we are investigating the 
> derivation of OWL ontologies from the ISO/TC 211 UML models which 
> would provide an in depth and standard vocabulary for the description 
> of geographic information for the Semantic Web. These ontologies would 
> support Semantic Web applications and services dealing with geographic 
> information and would be a fundamental resource to integrate of 
> associate Web information dealing with a geographic component. Ongoing 
> discussions in the project team and in the technical committee are 
> very optimistic at the moment. I find it important to share this 
> perspective with the Semantic Web community and those of you who have 
> interest and comments about this activity are invited to share it to 
> get a better understanding of the needs for such an ontology. The 
> project team will submit a draft report to ISO/TC 211 this year for 
> agreement and further processing. I will keep this comminity informed 
> of further developments regarding this subject.
> Sincerely,
> __
> */Jean Brodeur/*
> ISO/TC 211 - PT1950 project leader
> email:* **brodeur@rncan.gc.ca*
> Internet:* **http://www.cits.rncan.gc.ca/html/brodeurj 
> <blocked::blocked::http://www.cits.rncan.gc.ca/html/brodeurj>*
> Ressources naturelles Canada / Natural Resources Canada
> Centre d’information topographique / Centre for Topographic Information
> Gouvernement du Canada / Government of Canada
> 2144-010 rue King Ouest, Sherbrooke (Québec) Canada J1J 2E8
> 2144-010 King West Street, Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada J1J 2E8
> téléphone / phone: 819.564.5600 ext. 251
> télécopieur / facsimile: 819.564.5698

-- 

*Bernard Vatant
*Knowledge Engineering
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Received on Monday, 4 August 2008 07:54:22 UTC