> Sean Gillies wrote: > > It's curious how alien the concept of geographic entities identified by URIs is to GIS folks. See Adena Schutzberg (not a programmer, but no dummy) scramble to make sense of it: > > http://apb.directionsmag.com/archives/6086-Linked-Geodata-OSM-Gets-Linkable.html. For all the talk of "GeoWeb" in GIS, we still don't quite get the web. > > From: Bill Thoen <[email protected]> > Well, when you pack 80 lbs of baggage into a 20lb suitcase, it makes that suitcase surprisingly hard to lift. With sentences like this one: > > "LinkedGeoData currently comprises RDF dumps, Linked Data and REST interfaces, links to DBpedia as well as a prototypical user interface for linked-geo-data browsing and authoring." > > Adena concludes "that project is about making OSM more useful for programmers and to provide tools to browse it and author in it."
Adena is smart, but gets this one wrong. Can anyone explain how an RDF representation of OSM is going to help any programmer? Many many programmers, some from a web background, others GIS, make perfectly awesome use of OSM. It also happens to have geographic entities identified by URIs, and a RESTful UI. That doesn't mean there isn't anything to improve, but I'm doubtful RDF is it http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Protocol_Version_0.6 -Mikel ________________________________ you're not going to reach a very wide audience. The unprepared mind chokes on these gobbets of concepts, packed so tightly in one sentence. Adena's right to point out that most of us have to look up about every third word in that announcement and even then it's still hard to make sense of it. Of course, that announcement isn't meant for everyone, but it reminds knowlessmen like me that GIS on the web can get complicated. And as long as it remains portrayed as that complicated, we're not likely to get anywhere until Google simplifies it and shows us how it's done, like they did with web mapping a couple of years ago. In fact, that's happening already. Look around and you'll see a growing number of interesting mash-ups with a Google map component being developed by people with little or no GIS experience. People who don't know the difference between large and small-scale maps, or which one's the longitude in a coordinate, or what "geocoding" means, are coming up with some pretty clever and innovative mash-ups where location plays a part. If GISers (or geowankers) focus too closely on the minutia of standards and protocols instead of what they're for, we'll get caught flat-footed again. (But it was amusing seeing the dominant GIS companies come up off their beds of laurels and scramble to come up with a plausible response as to why they didn't get there first!) - Bill Thoen _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org
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