Great circle arcs are the shortest surface paths between two points
on a spherical body. I've minted some URIs (and am serving up RDF/
XML) for great circle arcs on the surface of the Earth. Amongst other
things, the RDF/XML returned will tell you the distance between the
points, the compass bearing and the midpoint.
For example, the arc between London and Tokyo is represented as:
<http://ontologi.es/place/arc/51.507778;-0.128056/35.683333;139.766667>
which is a geo:SpatialThing. There is also:
<http://ontologi.es/place/arc/
51.507778;-0.128056/35.683333;139.766667#points>
which is an rdfs:Container representing the (infinite) set of all
points between the two endpoints of the line.
An additional feature is the ability to link to URIs representing the
endpoints. e.g.:
<http://ontologi.es/place/arc/
51.507778;-0.128056/35.683333;139.766667?uri1=http://dbpedia.org/
resource/London&uri2=http://dbpedia.org/resource/Tokyo>
The document you get returned still has a primaryTopic of
<http://ontologi.es/place/arc/51.507778;-0.128056/35.683333;139.766667>
(i.e. it doesn't alter the linked data URI) but now contains explicit
dbpedia references for the end points. Those URIs don't have to be
from dbpedia - they could be anything - they're not used in
calculations of distances, etc - just included in the output.
Possible uses: flight and travel linked data.
Any ideas for improvements?
--
Toby A Inkster
<mailto:[email protected]>
<http://tobyinkster.co.uk>
