Re: Geographic Tags in HTML

Andrew Daviel wrote:
> 
> Last year I posted some proposals for geographic tagging of Web pages.
> It was pointed out that there might be more interest if there
> was an application.
> 
> So, now there is a demo application - http://geotags.com/script/geosearch

Cool service! I have a suggestion about the markup...

> Other changes - the "country" tag has been dropped, merged into "region".
> "region" now formally uses ISO 3166-2 country subdivision codes, available
> from http://geotags.com/geo/iso3166 (I think - the 'net's broken 'twixt me
> and there at present). ISO 3166-2 for the US and Canada is trivial - "CA"
> or "US" hyphen State/Province e.g. US-NY or CA-BC. ISO 3166-1 alone is
> allowed for geo.region, e.g. "RU" - the old "geo.country" tag.
> 
> geo.position follows RFC 2426 (vCard), which many people are now using
> (at least, lat;long is in the vCard RFC and many people are using vCard,
> which is admittedly not quite the same thing as many people using lat;long
> ...)
> 
> Precis:
> 
>      <META NAME="geo.position" content="48.54;-123.84">
> 
>    describes a resource at position 48.54 degrees North, 123.84 degrees
>    West.

I was going to suggest you use RDF and sketch a schema, but I see
you've considered that...

"The tags are described in terms of current HTML practice, which does
          not preclude them being represented in another manner such as
RDF or
          XML. "
	-- http://geotags.com/geo/geotags2.html

Meanwhile, I highly recommend you ground the terms in your vocabulary
in the Web using the HTML profile syntax:

	Meta data profiles 

http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-html40-19980424/struct/global.html#h-7.4.4.3

for example, just change the HEAD tag to:

	<HEAD profile="http://geotags.com/geo/geotags2.html">

That way (1) if somebody else uses the name "geo.region" for something
else, you can tell them apart, and (2) if somebody finds an HTML
document and wonders what the heck geo.region means, they have
a place to look.



>      <META NAME="geo.placename" content="London, Ont">
>      <META NAME="geo.region" content="CA-ON">
> 
>    describes a resource in London, Ontario, Canada
> 
> These tags are only meaningful, and should only be used, for
> pages that relate to a specific place. You put geo.position on the
> page for your walk-in retail store, not on your resume or
> software manual. (geo.region is OK if the page really does have some
> regionality, e.g. "CA" on Canadian tax preparation software)
> 
> More information at http://geotags.com
> 
> Andrew Daviel
> Vancouver Webpages

And now some notes before I forget...

	-- it should be easy to use XSLT to screen-scrape this markup into RDF
	http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-interest/2000Mar/0103.html

	-- relationship to dc.coverage?
	http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.0/coverage

	-- any relevant stuff from the posdep workshop?

W3C - WAP Forum Workshop on Position Dependent Information Services
INRIA Sophia Antipolis, France, February 15 - 16, 2000
http://www.w3.org/Mobile/posdep/

I added www-rdf-interest to the cc: list; I hope you don't mind.

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Saturday, 29 April 2000 00:43:42 UTC