Also, there is Geonames (http://www.geonames.org), which is the primary
geographic data set on the Semantic Web. Here is the link to Athens:
http://www.geonames.org/search.html?q=athens&country=GR
kc
On 4/6/12 4:54 PM, Karen Miller wrote:
Ethan, have you considered Getty's Thesaurus of Geographic Names? It does
provide a geographic hierarchy, although the data for Athens they provide isn't
quite the one you've described:
http://www.getty.edu/vow/TGNHierarchy?find=athens&place=&nation=&prev_page=1&english=Y&subjectid=7001393
This vocabulary is available in XML here:
http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/obtain/index.html
I have looked at it but not used it; it's a big tangled mess of XML.
MODS mimics a hierarchy (the subject/hierarchicalGeographic element has these
children: continent, country, province, region, state, territory, county, city,
island, area, extraterrestrialArea, citySection). The VRA Core location element
provides a similar mapping.
I try to stay away from Dublin Core, but I did venture onto the DC Terms page
just now and saw TGN listed in the vocabulary encoding schemes there, so
probably someone has implemented it.
Karen
Karen D. Miller
Monographic/Digital Projects Cataloger
Bibliographic Services Dept.
Northwestern University Library
Evanston, IL
k-mill...@northwestern.edu
847-467-3462
-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Ethan
Gruber
Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2012 12:49 PM
To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: [CODE4LIB] Representing geographic hiearchy in linked data
Hi all,
I have a dilemma that needs to be sorted out. I'm looking for an ontology that
can describe geographic hierarchy, and hopefully someone on the list has
experience with this. For example, if I have an RDF record that describes
Athens, I want to point Athens to Attica, and Attica to Greece, and so on. The
current proposal is to use dcterms:partOf, but the problem with this is that
our records will also use dcterms:partOf to describe a completely different
type of relational concept, and it will be almost impossible for scripts to
recognize the difference between these two uses of the same DC term.
Thanks,
Ethan
--
Karen Coyle
kco...@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
