Lars Marius Garshol wrote:
> * Jason Cupp
> |
> | In my line of work a gazetteer is basically a thesaurus of
> | geographic names with extra-attributes of geographic location (lat,
> | lon) it some coordinate system.
>
> I've seen this, and I've wondered about it. It seems awfully
> low-precision (ontologically, I mean) and almost crying out for topic
> maps.
>
> | Has there been any discussion of using a geographically based subject
> | indicators for topicmaps?
>
> As Martin said, the OASIS GeoLang TC is working on that. What the TC
> does is only to pin down individual subjects, without saying anything
> about them. For an example of a topic map about geographical subjects,
> see the one below. (It's rather stripped down, unfortunately.)
One of the things I'd always meant to publish, but quit working on
since there began the PubSubj TC, is a set of topics for datatypes.
My prototypes were based on subject indicators stolen from the XML
Schema Datatypes specification (literally using refs in the TOC from
that document as a basis for subjects). Using this in extension it
would then be possible to define canonical datatypes for latitude
and longitude, which then could be shared.
Unless I'm mistaken, the GeoLang TC is basing their topics on the
scoped names of countries and regions, not their locations in
physical space. Absent the means of expressing locations in either
geographical or three dimensional space, it's hard to imagine a
good way to interoperably share this information.
Murray
......................................................................
Murray Altheim <http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/>
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK
If you're the first person in a new territory,
you're likely to get shot at.
-- ma