Hi,
There's a draft standard for Governmental Units developed by the Federal
Geographic Data Committee. Although it's designed for U.S. data, it's
probably worth looking at. It's based on GML schema, described at:
http://www.fgdc.gov/standards/projects/incits-l1-standards-projects/framework/index_html
if you want to see a sample application we have a server of select units
up for the U.S. Northeast:
http://nbii-nin.ciesin.columbia.edu/mapserver/en/index.html
(see the Governmental Units link, number 7).
We haven't dealt with time yet for this. For our global boundary data
collection we just use versions -- a simple approach of a shapefile for
each year that we need to keep (~5 year update cycle) and notes on how
we translate attributes from year to year. We may revise this for our
next update cycle, I'll be interested to see how you handle it and what
emerges from the GeoRSS debate.
Greg
Lars Aronsson wrote:
From public sources I can dig up pretty much information about
Sweden's administrative divisions, both current and historic.
This could be used as a skeleton for adding more information, such
as population statistics and georeferencing. As far as I know,
this is not currently provided from any single and open source.
Much of this information has already been included in Wikipedia,
from where, however, it can be hard to dig out, especially the
structure.
But a "World Atlas of Sweden" is of limited use, and this should
be an international project. Is there any standard file format for
expressing these things? My first attempt was like this:
<country id="se">
<name lang="sv">Sverige</name>
<name lang="en">Sweden</name>
<adm1 id="01">
<name>Stockholms län</name>
<link>http://www.ab.lst.se/</link>
<link>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_County</link>
<adm2 id="0114">
<name>Upplands Väsby</name>
<link>http://www.upplandsvasby.se/</link>
<link>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upplands_V%C3%A4sby_Municipality</link>
<adm3 id="011401" pastoral="131402">
<name>Ed</name>
<link>http://www.edsforsamling.se/</link>
<link>http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eds_f%C3%B6rsamling_%28Stockholms_stift%29</link>
<link>http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed%2C_Upplands_V%C3%A4sby_kommun</link>
</adm3>
<adm3 id="011402" pastoral="131403">
<name>Hammarby</name>
</adm3>
This plays on the ADM1, ADM2, ADM3, ADM4 codes used in the GEOnet
Names Server, and the <link> tag used in RSS.
How can temporal changes, such as the merger of adm3 011401 with
adm3 011402 at some point in time, be represented in XML? Or is
that only too advanced? Should I give up, and simply publish a
new file for each year? Should web links be removed from the
version for 1967?
Besides this administrative division, Sweden also has an
ecclesiastical division (episcopal sees, contract districts,
pastoral districts, parishes) and a judicial division (court
districts). These are partly overlapping, for example the adm3 is
mostly the same as the fourth level of the ecclesiastical division
(parishes). I've tried to address this by the pastoral=""
attribute to the adm3 tag, suggesting that each adm3 has both an
adm2 parent and an "ecc3" (pastoral district) parent.
So my question is first: Is anybody doing this already? Is there
a standard format that I should use?
And second: If we really have to design a new file format, what
should it look like?
--
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Gregory Yetman
Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN)
Columbia University
URL: http://www.ciesin.columbia.edu/
e-mail: gyetman (at) ciesin.columbia.edu
tel: (845) 365-8982
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