RE: Geographic tagging of HTML pages - draft-daviel-html-geo-tag- 00.txt

foo! Thought I'd sent this earlier...

On Tue, 13 Apr 1999, David Norris wrote:

> > Perhaps if we listed the resource's right ascension and declination if it
> is
> > a non-terrestrial resource?
> 
> Good thought.

No! This draft is deliberately simple in the hope of attracting a wider
audience. All positions are on the Earth.

Any other co-ordinate schemes should use a different META tag or metadata
method altogether where different co-ordinate systems are allowed for.
Such richer metadata sets would allow specification of co-ordinate system,
datum, accuracy, etc. etc. Many GIS metadata sets allow for this kind
of thing, although I am unaware of any celestial scheme.
<meta name="celestial.position"  ???


> 
> > How many martian resources are we expecting?
> 
> I don't know.  Potentially quite a number of them.  How many web resources
> are there now about places on Mars, Venus, Moon, etc.  The way I read the
> draft, the resource would contain information about the coordinates
> specified.  It explicitly states that the resource may or may not be located
> at the coordinates specified.

Hmm. Is this ambiguous ?
Let's try an example.

A Web page describes the Mona Lisa, perhaps with a photograph. It's
published by a Brazilian company with a URL in the ibm.net domain and
hosted on a webserver in Canada. The resource described by the page is the
Mona Lisa, so its geo.position is Paris, France. Not Brazil, not Armonk NY
and not Canada. The resource *is* located at, or associated with, the
coordinates specified; the *page* (whatever that means, geographically)
probably is not.

"Resource" is used as a general term for "thing", be it a solid object
like a mountain, or a less tangible object like a Zip code or school
catchment area which may be associated with a geographic position.

(Incidentally, there is work underway in e.g. ISO/TC211 to define methods
for transmitting geographic data in XML. Geo-enabled applications will
be able to talk to other. This draft (geo.position etc.) is designed to be
way, way simpler in the hope of ordinary mortals being able to understand
and use it.)


Andrew Daviel
Vancouver Webpages & TRIUMF

Received on Friday, 16 April 1999 14:17:44 UTC