GeoInfo

From W3C Wiki

Places are a recurring theme in the SemanticWeb, along with people, documents, times, and money. (see FriendOfaFriend, DublinCore, RdfCalendar, as well as SeedApplications and VocabularyMarket). See GeoOnion for an attempt to relate lat/long points to 'within n metres of' concentric circles that encompass them.

So far, we have a lat/long vocab page and workspace. The coolest thing about it is probably that the GeoURL database, with zillions of web pages related to lat/long, can be queried with results in RDF using this vocabulary; results look like...


<rdf:RDF
    xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
    xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"
    xmlns:geo="http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#"
    xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#">

    <rdf:Description rdf:about="http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sprite/index.html">
        <dc:title>Bridget Spitznagel</dc:title>
        <foaf:topic rdf:parseType="Resource">
            <geo:lat>40.442673</geo:lat>
            <geo:long>-79.945815</geo:long>
        </foaf:topic>
    </rdf:Description>
</rdf:RDF>


Nearby: GeoOnion, CoordinateProperty

Q & A

Is there an upcoming ScheduledTopicChat on this stuff?

  • hmm... not clear.
  • stay tuned to www-rdf-interest MailingLists for notice, which should come a week or so in advance.

What's on the agenda?

  • review of outstanding stuff from 16Apr, 30 Apr, 28 May:
  • your agenda request here

Has there been any ScheduledTopicChat on this stuff?

Updated by --Dan Brickley (talk) 17:03, 19 September 2016 (UTC) Sept 2016 for new domain name on these links and IRC logs:


Who's working on this stuff?

The following folks have shown interest:

See also attendance records for previous chats, above.

Is this a formal standardization effort?

  • It is more of an experiment in representing mapping and location data within the RDF graph data model.

Is anybody building an RDF vocabulary for stuff like latitude/longitude?

Need to be careful about specifity

OK, but you can't put RDF into XHTML and have it (easily) validate. So what's the best way to get georeferencing data into an (X)HTML page? There seem to be many choices, without a clear winner. The DublinCore DC.Coverage.spatial type would seem to be the most desireable, but is perhaps the one that is least defined (at least it is confusing to implement)

(X)HTML georeferencing formats:

RSS georeferencing formats:

RSS Reader using GeoInfo:

  • [www.plazoo.com/info/de/newsreader.asp RSS Reader from plazoo]

Other georeferencing formats:

Further reading on georeferencing metadata

Is anybody using this wgs_84 vocab? Are there collaborative RDF knowledgebases about geo info I can contribute to?

How accurate are lat/lon coordinates? Georeferencing Guidelines contains a lot of useful background information on georeferencing, but most importantly, contains a table that details the level of uncertainty (in meters) associated with various levels of precision in WGS-84 coordinates.

what do you mean by WGS_84 vocab?

So why doesn't the WGS-84 vocab explicitly reference wgs-84 in the resulting RDF data? Not having the string WGS-84 near the lat/lon coordinates may make it unclear to software which coordinate system is referenced. Especially since the schema states A point, typically described using a coordinate system relative to Earth, such as WGS84.?

Business cards have geographical info; anybody playing with that?

Travel planning is a pain; does the SemanticWeb help?

Speaking of travel... can I use the SemanticWeb to find restaurants when I travel?

What if I want to blog about the places I visit?

Any other RDF data about places?

does anyone have some pointers for storing TGN-like geographic place information in RDF? specifically, place containership i.e. a place called england contains a place called sussex?

OK, so lat/long seems done; what about relations between places... inRegion, cospatial and the like?

An intern at W3C is going to work on an SVG tool for putting things on maps and being able to use different kinds of description - lat/long, named places, etc. He starts on 2003-05-05. The 4 month project is not yet completely defined, and suggestions (via mailing list) are welcome.

Are there any cool SVG visualization tools?

How can I map city names to latitude/longitude?

How can I compute distances between places?

  • RDF And Distances, by Sean Palmer. Uses Cwm to generate a set of distances from town to town in the U.S.A., based upon map coordinates. (also schema: infomesh-geo)

Any work on U.S. Postal info, like city/state/zip? Can I print mailing labels from RDF data?

Are there sources of data out there that I might mine for geographic data?

Capital cities and cities of 100,000 and more inhabitants, which DanConnolly team2Globe.n3

How about existing open source software I can build on?