[OSGeo-Discuss] Summary: Representing Places With Intelligent URLs
Thanks for all of the responses. After some careful consideration of the responses I received I realize the challenges of trying to get real world features into the type of hierarchy I derive. I'm going to check out the system Geonames is using with RDFa. I think I might be able to use their technique for uniquely identifying places. Thank you again for your help. Landon Office Phone Number: (209) 946-0268 Cell Phone Number: (209) 992-0658 -Original Message- From: discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org [mailto:discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Allan Doyle Sent: Wednesday, October 06, 2010 7:40 AM To: OSGeo Discussions Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] RE: Representing Places With Intelligent URLs On Oct 5, 2010, at 9:58 PM, Bob Basques wrote: All, I'm a long time address database creation/maintenance/re-creation fiend myself. I've also been working with the USNG (MGRS) gridding system the last few years, and need to at least suggest the idea of using a Gridding system to locate things. This idea is not nbew, but USNG usage has gained quite a bit of ground the last couple of years across all level of government, with a large emphasis placed on using it for disaster response. Tying a placeName to a grid location that can describe things down to the centimeter if needed and still stay unique as a location is a very good thing. Don't be too sure at the centimeter level. The average rate of motion across the San Andreas Fault Zone during the past 3 million years is 56 mm/yr (2 in/yr). -- http://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/facts.php I like Chris Schmidt's quote: The world is fuzzier than you realize. Allan bobb On 10/5/2010 8:52 PM, Landon Blake wrote: The geonames ontology looks like it might work for me. I'll read it over tomorrow. Thanks for the suggestion. Landon Sent from my iPhone On Oct 5, 2010, at 5:45 PM, Ian Turtonijtur...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 8:39 PM, Christopher Schmidt crschm...@crschmidt.net wrote: On Tue, Oct 05, 2010 at 05:18:47PM -0700, Paul Ramsey wrote: All attempts to construct simple ontologies end up reinventing RDF . ? That was actually my first thought when I saw this: Hey look, someone else reinventing RDFa! :) Seriously, I say this with a bit of knowledge; I mean, after all, I sort of work on making places searchable on maps. For a company with a pretty big set of data about the hierarchy of the world. It's a lot fuzzier than you think :) Also, Landon, I do highly recommend looking into RDF -- specifically, RDFa -- because I think it's heading in a very similar direction to what you're describing, without the need for some all-world-hierarchy to tie it to, which might actually help you get a bit further. You might want to look at http://www.geonames.org/ontology/ which RDFs the GeoNames database. Ian -- Ian Turton ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss Warning: Information provided via electronic media is not guaranteed against defects including translation and transmission errors. If the reader is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this information in error, please notify the sender immediately. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- Allan Doyle Director of Technology MIT Museum | http://web.mit.edu/museum | +1.617.452.2111 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss Warning: Information provided via electronic media is not guaranteed against defects including translation and transmission errors. If the reader is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this information in error, please notify the sender immediately. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] RE: Representing Places With Intelligent URLs
Allen, You need the Centimeter stuff to realize that something moved over the two years. Besides, that just ends up being a re-projection in the end anyway. :c) bobb Allan Doyle afdo...@mit.edu wrote: On Oct 5, 2010, at 9:58 PM, Bob Basques wrote: All, I'm a long time address database creation/maintenance/re-creation fiend myself. I've also been working with the USNG (MGRS) gridding system the last few years, and need to at least suggest the idea of using a Gridding system to locate things. This idea is not nbew, but USNG usage has gained quite a bit of ground the last couple of years across all level of government, with a large emphasis placed on using it for disaster response. Tying a placeName to a grid location that can describe things down to the centimeter if needed and still stay unique as a location is a very good thing. Don't be too sure at the centimeter level. The average rate of motion across the San Andreas Fault Zone during the past 3 million years is 56 mm/yr (2 in/yr). -- http://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/facts.php I like Chris Schmidt's quote: The world is fuzzier than you realize. Allan bobb On 10/5/2010 8:52 PM, Landon Blake wrote: The geonames ontology looks like it might work for me. I'll read it over tomorrow. Thanks for the suggestion. Landon Sent from my iPhone On Oct 5, 2010, at 5:45 PM, Ian Turtonijtur...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 8:39 PM, Christopher Schmidt crschm...@crschmidt.net wrote: On Tue, Oct 05, 2010 at 05:18:47PM -0700, Paul Ramsey wrote: All attempts to construct simple ontologies end up reinventing RDF . ? That was actually my first thought when I saw this: Hey look, someone else reinventing RDFa! :) Seriously, I say this with a bit of knowledge; I mean, after all, I sort of work on making places searchable on maps. For a company with a pretty big set of data about the hierarchy of the world. It's a lot fuzzier than you think :) Also, Landon, I do highly recommend looking into RDF -- specifically, RDFa -- because I think it's heading in a very similar direction to what you're describing, without the need for some all-world-hierarchy to tie it to, which might actually help you get a bit further. You might want to look at http://www.geonames.org/ontology/ which RDFs the GeoNames database. Ian -- Ian Turton ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss Warning: Information provided via electronic media is not guaranteed against defects including translation and transmission errors. If the reader is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this information in error, please notify the sender immediately. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- Allan Doyle Director of Technology MIT Museum | http://web.mit.edu/museum | +1.617.452.2111 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[OSGeo-Discuss] RE: Representing Places With Intelligent URLs
Hi The knowledge you are trying to encode should be represented as associations between individuals (this place contains that place etc) and concepts (city, park, post office delivery area, etc) (as in OWL) rather than a URI scheme (see Geonames). The basic idea is to represent places in a way that allows inference (make implicit knowledge explicit) i.e. logical consequence e.g. Explicit: a country only has only one capital city Explicit: NZ is a country Explicit: Wellington is the capital of NZ Explicit: 'Te Upoko o te Ika a Maui' is the capital of NZ Implicit: Wellington and 'Te Upoko o te Ika a Maui' are the same place - you cant do this nicely with a URL scheme but an OWL reasoner can make such conclusions - yehar Semantic Web. Actualy there is really no problem with your URI scheme otherwise. It looks exactly like what you would expect for REST Web Services URLs - as long as you don't expect your URLs to be the ultimate and final identifiers - that would break both of the two main assumptions behind the semantic web and its underlying formal logics. regards Geoff From: discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org [discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Landon Blake [lbl...@ksninc.com] Sent: Wednesday, 6 October 2010 12:45 p.m. To: OSGeo Discussions Subject: [OSGeo-Discuss] Representing Places With Intelligent URLs A talk at the recent Location Business Summit and some reading I've done about the semantic web and microformats lately got me to thinking about a standard way to represent places, place names, place data on the web. (I must admit I'm a desktop software guy, not a web programmer.) I thought it would be awesome if there was a way to create a unique URL for places that was somewhat intelligent to humans. If this URL could point to a folder on a server with some basic information about a place, that would be even better. So I took a stab at creating this type of URL for my city, the City of Stockton. Here it is: http://www.standardwebmarkup.org/standard_places/north_america/united_st ates_of_america/california/san_joaquin_county/city_of_stockton/ You can see the URL follows a logical hierarchy, and it would be easy to determine what the URL for the City of Sacramento, San Joaquin County, or Victory Park in the City of Stockton would be. Obviously the continent/country/state/county/city/location URL pattern would have to change for other parts of the world. I put a very simple HTML file with data about the City of Stockton here: http://www.standardwebmarkup.org/standard_places/north_america/united_st ates_of_america/california/san_joaquin_county/city_of_stockton/info.html The current info.html file is just a skeleton. It's more of a place holder right now than anything else. My thought was to also put a WKT file (place.wkt) representing the location of the place and a simple text file (data.txt) with facts about the place at this same URL: http://www.standardwebmarkup.org/standard_places/north_america/united_st ates_of_america/california/san_joaquin_county/city_of_stockton/ Now, if someone wanted to write content about the City of Stockton, they could simply do something like this: a href=http://www.standardwebmarkup.org/standard_places/north_america/uni ted_states_of_america/california/san_joaquin_county/city_of_stockton/S tockton/a If everyone that was putting web content about Stockton online did the same thing, search engine and other tools would be able to link data from this web content to a single location. This becomes even more powerful if we come up with some rules for the content of the info.html file, place.wkt file, and the data text file. Here are some examples: (1) Specify that the place.wkt file have both a point and a polygon WKT representation, or a linestring representation, of the place when appropriate. (2) Specify that the info.html file use a list with alternate place names. This list would be identified with an html class value of alternate_place_names. (3) Specify that the data.txt file contain a relationships section that can contain an optional relationship in the form of: City is the County Seat of County. (Stockton is the County Seat of San Joaquin County.) (4) Standardize the way common place facts are stored in the data.txt file. Population and area are examples. I realize there are some problems with this overall scheme. How do you store a city that straddles a state boundary, for example? Or what if you want to have a URL for the location of the Pacific Garbage Patch? However, I think we could use this system to uniquely identify and describe a lot of places in the world. We could then work on how to handle the edge cases. Is anyone else interested in ironing out the kinks for a system like this? Is there already a system like this in place? (If so, I have just revealed my great ignorance to everyone on this mailing list.) I'm interested in setting something up that could be maintained
RE: [OSGeo-Discuss] RE: Representing Places With Intelligent URLs
Hi Yes it's a blatent simplification, although... semantics... Interesting the association between truth and space, and then there's time regards Geoff From: discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org [discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of P Kishor [punk.k...@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, 7 October 2010 10:14 a.m. To: OSGeo Discussions Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] RE: Representing Places With Intelligent URLs On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 3:45 PM, Geoff Hay geoffrey@otago.ac.nz wrote: Hi The knowledge you are trying to encode should be represented as associations between individuals (this place contains that place etc) and concepts (city, park, post office delivery area, etc) (as in OWL) rather than a URI scheme (see Geonames). The basic idea is to represent places in a way that allows inference (make implicit knowledge explicit) i.e. logical consequence e.g. Explicit: a country only has only one capital city I am assuming the above is just for illustration, because we have http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_multiple_capitals To make matters worse, we also have http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_spanning_more_than_one_continent and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_areas_that_overlap_multiple_countries and probably more. Explicit: NZ is a country Explicit: Wellington is the capital of NZ Explicit: 'Te Upoko o te Ika a Maui' is the capital of NZ Implicit: Wellington and 'Te Upoko o te Ika a Maui' are the same place - you cant do this nicely with a URL scheme but an OWL reasoner can make such conclusions - yehar Semantic Web. Actualy there is really no problem with your URI scheme otherwise. It looks exactly like what you would expect for REST Web Services URLs - as long as you don't expect your URLs to be the ultimate and final identifiers - that would break both of the two main assumptions behind the semantic web and its underlying formal logics. regards Geoff From: discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org [discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Landon Blake [lbl...@ksninc.com] Sent: Wednesday, 6 October 2010 12:45 p.m. To: OSGeo Discussions Subject: [OSGeo-Discuss] Representing Places With Intelligent URLs A talk at the recent Location Business Summit and some reading I've done about the semantic web and microformats lately got me to thinking about a standard way to represent places, place names, place data on the web. (I must admit I'm a desktop software guy, not a web programmer.) I thought it would be awesome if there was a way to create a unique URL for places that was somewhat intelligent to humans. If this URL could point to a folder on a server with some basic information about a place, that would be even better. So I took a stab at creating this type of URL for my city, the City of Stockton. Here it is: http://www.standardwebmarkup.org/standard_places/north_america/united_st ates_of_america/california/san_joaquin_county/city_of_stockton/ You can see the URL follows a logical hierarchy, and it would be easy to determine what the URL for the City of Sacramento, San Joaquin County, or Victory Park in the City of Stockton would be. Obviously the continent/country/state/county/city/location URL pattern would have to change for other parts of the world. I put a very simple HTML file with data about the City of Stockton here: http://www.standardwebmarkup.org/standard_places/north_america/united_st ates_of_america/california/san_joaquin_county/city_of_stockton/info.html The current info.html file is just a skeleton. It's more of a place holder right now than anything else. My thought was to also put a WKT file (place.wkt) representing the location of the place and a simple text file (data.txt) with facts about the place at this same URL: http://www.standardwebmarkup.org/standard_places/north_america/united_st ates_of_america/california/san_joaquin_county/city_of_stockton/ Now, if someone wanted to write content about the City of Stockton, they could simply do something like this: a href=http://www.standardwebmarkup.org/standard_places/north_america/uni ted_states_of_america/california/san_joaquin_county/city_of_stockton/S tockton/a If everyone that was putting web content about Stockton online did the same thing, search engine and other tools would be able to link data from this web content to a single location. This becomes even more powerful if we come up with some rules for the content of the info.html file, place.wkt file, and the data text file. Here are some examples: (1) Specify that the place.wkt file have both a point and a polygon WKT representation, or a linestring representation, of the place when appropriate. (2) Specify that the info.html file use a list with alternate place names. This list would be identified with an html class value of
