Richard Cyganiak wrote: > On 29 Jan 2007, at 18:44, Stefano Mazzocchi wrote: > >> Kelly Jones wrote: >>> Has anyone converted the geographical data at >>> "http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/cntry_files.html"; (info on six >>> million >>> plus placenames) to RDF format? >> not that I know of. >> >>> Seems like this would be a fairly easy thing to do, and fairly >>> useful? >> Definately. >> >> Even if geonames.org already offers a fairly useful set of web >> services >> (some of which semantic). Also another dump that might be useful for >> RDFization. > > They have RDF descriptions of each place in the database. The > description is available by dereferencing the URI. Example: http:// > sws.geonames.org/3213806/ , which is the part of Berlin where I live. > > I prefer this to a dump, because the data is already on the Web. > >> http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/ >> >> What's weird is how they don't have an RDF dump... > > Why is this weird?
because it would prevent crawlers from hitting their web sites. If you offer open data as a web service, and you don't provide a dump, you are basically asking others to consume a lot of your bandwidth in request/responses. but then again, maybe they don't see enough interests in the data to justify their spending time in maintaining an RDF dump... or maybe it's just dynamically generates from their database, so an RDF dump would be just like crawling their own web sites anyway. -- Stefano Mazzocchi Digital Libraries Research Group Research Scientist Massachusetts Institute of Technology E25-131, 77 Massachusetts Ave skype: stefanomazzocchi Cambridge, MA 02139-4307, USA email: stefanom at mit . edu ------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ General mailing list [email protected] http://simile.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/general
