Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] RE: Representing Places With Intelligent URLs

2010-10-06 Thread Bob Basques
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
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RE: [OSGeo-Discuss] RE: Representing Places With Intelligent URLs

2010-10-06 Thread Geoff Hay
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

Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] RE: Representing Places With Intelligent URLs

2010-10-05 Thread Christopher Schmidt
On Tue, Oct 05, 2010 at 05:03:14PM -0700, Michael P. Gerlek wrote:
  ...it would be easy to determine what the URL for...
 
 Alas, it is not clear to me that, even within the US, there is a universally 
 recognized canonicalization of the place name hierarchy, much less the names 
 themselves.
 
 For example, you refer to california, as opposed to state_of_california, 
 and yet you refer to city of stockton as opposed to stockton.  Further, 
 strictly speaking certain states actually commonwealths (and, similarly, 
 counties are parishes).  And let's not talk about geographic entities that 
 the post office recognizes but the local government does not.

How about the fact that although some counties contain cities,
some cities exist over the border between multiple counties, and
other counties are *contained* by cities? (Queens, Manhattan, etc.)

How about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysart_et_al,_Ontario?

Any effort to turn the real world into a standard hierarchy
will fail, because the world is Fuzzier than you realize.

-- Chris

 The mind, alas, boggles.
 
 (But maybe I'm reading more into your proposal than you meant, or I'm taking 
 your example too literally?)
 
 -mpg
 
 
 -Original Message-
 From: discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org 
 [mailto:discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Landon Blake
 Sent: Tuesday, October 05, 2010 4:46 PM
 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 

Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] RE: Representing Places With Intelligent URLs

2010-10-05 Thread Paul Ramsey
All attempts to construct simple ontologies end up reinventing RDF .. ?

On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 5:12 PM, Christopher Schmidt
crschm...@crschmidt.net wrote:

 How about the fact that although some counties contain cities,
 some cities exist over the border between multiple counties, and
 other counties are *contained* by cities? (Queens, Manhattan, etc.)

 How about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysart_et_al,_Ontario?

 Any effort to turn the real world into a standard hierarchy
 will fail, because the world is Fuzzier than you realize.

 -- Chris

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RE: [OSGeo-Discuss] RE: Representing Places With Intelligent URLs

2010-10-05 Thread Landon Blake
I understand there are challenges to what I'm trying to accomplish. However, I 
think you could likely tackle the majority of places with the system I 
describe, even though it would not be perfect.

Yes, there are several ways to designate City of Stockton or State of 
California. The point of the system I propose is to eliminate some of this 
ambiguity by settling on one of the possible names for the URL. Alternative 
place names could be listed in the information for the place stored at the URL. 
This sort of adheres to the convention over configuration concept.

As a web content provider, I don't really care if the URL ends with Stockton 
or City of Stockton. As long as it uniquely identifies the city, and other 
people understand this, I get what I want. If everyone creating place URLS 
understands you say Stockton and not City of Stockton or California and 
not State of California I think this could work.

Once again, I admit there are edge cases that will break the system I proposed, 
but I think it could be good for 80% of the world.

Like I said, I'm not primarily a web guy, and this is new territory for me. 
However, most of the semantic web stuff I read is why too difficult to 
understand.

It here was a way to uniquely identify a place with an intelligent URL, I would 
be using it in my own web pages today. Perhaps I am in the minority. 

I just thought I'd bounce this crazy idea of the list to see if it could float.

I got a little excited when I thought about being able to scrape the web for 
population data of major cities using URLS like this. Perhaps I was being a 
little naïve in my excitement.

Thanks,

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 Christopher Schmidt
Sent: Tuesday, October 05, 2010 5:12 PM
To: OSGeo Discussions
Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] RE: Representing Places With Intelligent URLs

On Tue, Oct 05, 2010 at 05:03:14PM -0700, Michael P. Gerlek wrote:
  ...it would be easy to determine what the URL for...
 
 Alas, it is not clear to me that, even within the US, there is a universally 
 recognized canonicalization of the place name hierarchy, much less the names 
 themselves.
 
 For example, you refer to california, as opposed to state_of_california, 
 and yet you refer to city of stockton as opposed to stockton.  Further, 
 strictly speaking certain states actually commonwealths (and, similarly, 
 counties are parishes).  And let's not talk about geographic entities that 
 the post office recognizes but the local government does not.

How about the fact that although some counties contain cities,
some cities exist over the border between multiple counties, and
other counties are *contained* by cities? (Queens, Manhattan, etc.)

How about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysart_et_al,_Ontario?

Any effort to turn the real world into a standard hierarchy
will fail, because the world is Fuzzier than you realize.

-- Chris

 The mind, alas, boggles.
 
 (But maybe I'm reading more into your proposal than you meant, or I'm taking 
 your example too literally?)
 
 -mpg
 
 
 -Original Message-
 From: discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org 
 [mailto:discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Landon Blake
 Sent: Tuesday, October 05, 2010 4:46 PM
 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

RE: [OSGeo-Discuss] RE: Representing Places With Intelligent URLs

2010-10-05 Thread Michael P. Gerlek
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but if we could just get enough people to all submit data for 
their own local areas using arbitrary free-form textual tags and maybe provide 
a voting mechanism for the best submissions, then we could...

Oh, wait -- never mind.

-mpg


-Original Message-
From: discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org [mailto:discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org] 
On Behalf Of Paul Ramsey
Sent: Tuesday, October 05, 2010 5:19 PM
To: OSGeo Discussions
Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] RE: Representing Places With Intelligent URLs

All attempts to construct simple ontologies end up reinventing RDF .. ?

On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 5:12 PM, Christopher Schmidt crschm...@crschmidt.net 
wrote:

 How about the fact that although some counties contain cities, some 
 cities exist over the border between multiple counties, and other 
 counties are *contained* by cities? (Queens, Manhattan, etc.)

 How about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysart_et_al,_Ontario?

 Any effort to turn the real world into a standard hierarchy will fail, 
 because the world is Fuzzier than you realize.

 -- Chris

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] RE: Representing Places With Intelligent URLs

2010-10-05 Thread P Kishor
On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 7:17 PM, Landon Blake lbl...@ksninc.com wrote:
 could be good for 80% of the world.

I wouldn’t go that far... perhaps for 20% of the world, maybe perhaps.

I personally know at least a couple of fairly large swaths of this
world where no such (or any) structure would fly.


-- 
Puneet Kishor http://www.punkish.org
Carbon Model http://carbonmodel.org
Charter Member, Open Source Geospatial Foundation http://www.osgeo.org
Science Commons Fellow, http://sciencecommons.org/about/whoweare/kishor
Nelson Institute, UW-Madison http://www.nelson.wisc.edu
---
Assertions are politics; backing up assertions with evidence is science
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] RE: Representing Places With Intelligent URLs

2010-10-05 Thread Tyler Mitchell
Textual semantics aside, we do have a natural geographic hierarchy though it's 
not necessarily any more readily usable :)  I remember when I first hear about 
http://confluence.org/ - that was fun.
I met some guys working on this concept that you might find interesting too:
http://www.geotude.com/about/nutshell

Tyler

On 2010-10-05, at 5:17 PM, Landon Blake wrote:

 I understand there are challenges to what I'm trying to accomplish. However, 
 I think you could likely tackle the majority of places with the system I 
 describe, even though it would not be perfect.
 
 Yes, there are several ways to designate City of Stockton or State of 
 California. The point of the system I propose is to eliminate some of this 
 ambiguity by settling on one of the possible names for the URL. Alternative 
 place names could be listed in the information for the place stored at the 
 URL. This sort of adheres to the convention over configuration concept.
 
 As a web content provider, I don't really care if the URL ends with 
 Stockton or City of Stockton. As long as it uniquely identifies the city, 
 and other people understand this, I get what I want. If everyone creating 
 place URLS understands you say Stockton and not City of Stockton or 
 California and not State of California I think this could work.
 
 Once again, I admit there are edge cases that will break the system I 
 proposed, but I think it could be good for 80% of the world.
 
 Like I said, I'm not primarily a web guy, and this is new territory for me. 
 However, most of the semantic web stuff I read is why too difficult to 
 understand.
 
 It here was a way to uniquely identify a place with an intelligent URL, I 
 would be using it in my own web pages today. Perhaps I am in the minority. 
 
 I just thought I'd bounce this crazy idea of the list to see if it could 
 float.
 
 I got a little excited when I thought about being able to scrape the web for 
 population data of major cities using URLS like this. Perhaps I was being a 
 little naïve in my excitement.
 
 Thanks,
 
 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 Christopher Schmidt
 Sent: Tuesday, October 05, 2010 5:12 PM
 To: OSGeo Discussions
 Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] RE: Representing Places With Intelligent URLs
 
 On Tue, Oct 05, 2010 at 05:03:14PM -0700, Michael P. Gerlek wrote:
 ...it would be easy to determine what the URL for...
 
 Alas, it is not clear to me that, even within the US, there is a universally 
 recognized canonicalization of the place name hierarchy, much less the names 
 themselves.
 
 For example, you refer to california, as opposed to state_of_california, 
 and yet you refer to city of stockton as opposed to stockton.  Further, 
 strictly speaking certain states actually commonwealths (and, similarly, 
 counties are parishes).  And let's not talk about geographic entities that 
 the post office recognizes but the local government does not.
 
 How about the fact that although some counties contain cities,
 some cities exist over the border between multiple counties, and
 other counties are *contained* by cities? (Queens, Manhattan, etc.)
 
 How about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysart_et_al,_Ontario?
 
 Any effort to turn the real world into a standard hierarchy
 will fail, because the world is Fuzzier than you realize.
 
 -- Chris
 
 The mind, alas, boggles.
 
 (But maybe I'm reading more into your proposal than you meant, or I'm taking 
 your example too literally?)
 
 -mpg
 
 
 -Original Message-
 From: discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org 
 [mailto:discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Landon Blake
 Sent: Tuesday, October 05, 2010 4:46 PM
 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

Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] RE: Representing Places With Intelligent URLs

2010-10-05 Thread Tyler Mitchell
On 2010-10-05, at 5:32 PM, P Kishor wrote:
 On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 7:17 PM, Landon Blake lbl...@ksninc.com wrote:
 could be good for 80% of the world.
 
 I wouldn’t go that far... perhaps for 20% of the world, maybe perhaps.
 
 I personally know at least a couple of fairly large swaths of this
 world where no such (or any) structure would fly.

Well one would hope it they would at least fall into 
/standard_places/planet_earth 
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] RE: Representing Places With Intelligent URLs

2010-10-05 Thread Christopher Schmidt
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.

-- Chris

 On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 5:12 PM, Christopher Schmidt
 crschm...@crschmidt.net wrote:
 
  How about the fact that although some counties contain cities,
  some cities exist over the border between multiple counties, and
  other counties are *contained* by cities? (Queens, Manhattan, etc.)
 
  How about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysart_et_al,_Ontario?
 
  Any effort to turn the real world into a standard hierarchy
  will fail, because the world is Fuzzier than you realize.
 
  -- Chris
 
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Christopher Schmidt
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] RE: Representing Places With Intelligent URLs

2010-10-05 Thread Landon Blake
Chris,

I'll look into rdfa. Thanks for the suggestion.

Landon

Sent from my iPhone

On Oct 5, 2010, at 5:37 PM, Christopher Schmidt crschm...@crschmidt.net 
wrote:

 


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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] RE: Representing Places With Intelligent URLs

2010-10-05 Thread Ian Turton
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
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] RE: Representing Places With Intelligent URLs

2010-10-05 Thread Landon Blake
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 Turton ijtur...@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
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