[tdwg-content] Proposal to Add a GeoSpatial "Area" to the DarwinCore
Steve Baskauf
steve.baskauf at vanderbilt.edu
Fri Nov 19 19:32:10 CET 2010
Pete,
I was going to ask questions about this the first time you mentioned it,
but got distracted. I guess the main question I have is: what you would
"do" with it? I guess it could be considered an identifier for a spot
on the earth, but based on what I've read about guids it's considered to
be a "no-no" to try to infer stuff about a resource by looking at the
form of the identifier. Rather one should look at the metadata
associated with the identifier to understand things about the identifier
(which you provide with geo:lat and geo:long). I suppose that one could
consider this to be some kind of identifier that could be reused, but
particularly since the precision of your lat and long are 8 digits, it
is highly unlikely that anybody besides you is ever going to choose to
use this identifier over (vs. 44.86,-87.23 which would be imprecise
enough to include a lot of places to which people might want to refer).
I may just be misunderstanding the purpose you intend.
The other question is a more general one. Do we need more ways to
specify uncertainty in location than we already have? We already have
dwc:coordinateUncertaintyInMeters and dwc:coordinatePrecision . I've
been using dwc:coordinateUncertaintyInMeters with a seat-of-the pants
estimate on my part about how accurate I think my geolocation is
(expressed in meters). That may be a misuse of this term because I'm
really thinking radius around a point rather than uncertainty of
coordinates. But as a practical matter, if I think my estimate of
location is good to 1000 m (vs. 100 m or 10000 m) does it really matter
if I'm talking about a square or a circle? In any case, I'm saying,
this lat/long could be off from the actual location by a km. If I had a
GPS receiver that allowed me to download the actual estimated accuracy
(based on satellite signals and whatever else), then I would populate
dwc:coordinateUncertaintyInMeters with that, but mine crummy old one
doesn't. To me the most important thing is for users to know whether
this is a ballpark estimate or if they could expect to actually be able
to walk up to the tree using the coordinates they give.
Steve
Peter DeVries wrote:
> I wrote about this earlier but I never heard anything back.
>
> I have made something that uses the geo vocabulary but also allows
> pointRadiusSpatial fit measure that I call radius.
>
> The advantage is that this adds a standard way to deal use something
> like an extent or pointRadiusSpatial while still benefiting from the
> widely used geo vocabulary.
>
> It also allows these "Areas" to be referenced in a commonly understood
> urn way that using a ietf standard.
>
> For example: "geo:44.86528100,-87.23147800;u=10"
>
> There are still some things I need to fix and check with this
> vocabulary but I am wondering if there is any interest in
> incorporating this into the DarwinCore.
>
> If not I will probably change the name of the ontology.
>
> There are also things in the example below that are not part of my
> proposal.
>
> I have what I call "Areas" that look like this:
>
> <dwc_area:Area rdf:about="geo:44.86528100,-87.23147800;u=10">
> <dcterms:title>44.86528100, -87.23147800 Radius 10
> meters</dcterms:title>
> <dcterms:isPartOf
> rdf:resource="http://lod.taxonconcept.org/ontology/void#this"/>
>
> <dcterms:identifier>geo:44.86528100,-87.23147800;u=10</dcterms:identifier>
> <dcterms:created>2010-10-28T00:00:00-0500</dcterms:created>
> <dcterms:modified>2010-11-09T16:33:34-0600</dcterms:modified>
> <geo:lat>44.86528100</geo:lat>
> <geo:long>-87.23147800</geo:long>
> <dwc_area:radius>10</dwc_area:radius>
> <txn:elevation>186.54</txn:elevation>
> <txn:continent>North America</txn:continent>
> <txn:countryCode>US</txn:countryCode>
> <txn:country>United States</txn:country>
> <txn:stateProvince>Wisconsin</txn:stateProvince>
> <txn:county>Door</txn:county>
> <txn:localityText>Town of Sevastopol</txn:localityText>
> <txn:locationName>Shivering Sands Natural Area
> Woods</txn:locationName>
> <txn:areaHasOccurrence
> rdf:resource="http://ocs.taxonconcept.org/ocs/f522444a-2dd9-400e-be59-47213ef38cb9#Occurrence"/>
> <txn:areaHasObservedSpeciesConcept
> rdf:resource="http://lod.taxonconcept.org/ses/ICmLC#Species"/>
> <txn:areaHasIndividual
> rdf:resource="http://ocs.taxonconcept.org/ocs/f522444a-2dd9-400e-be59-47213ef38cb9#Individual"/>
> <txn:areaInStateProvince
> rdf:resource="http://sws.geonames.org/5279468/"/>
> <txn:areaInCounty rdf:resource="http://sws.geonames.org/5250768/"/>
> <wdrs:describedBy
> rdf:resource="http://ocs.taxonconcept.org/ocs/f522444a-2dd9-400e-be59-47213ef38cb9.rdf"/>
> </dwc_area:Area>
>
> I recently added the following predicates, but have not altered my RDF
> examples.
>
> #featureContainsArea
> #areaWithInFeature
>
> http://lod.taxonconcept.org/ontology/dwc_area.owl
>
> OWL Doc http://lod.taxonconcept.org/ontology/dwc_area_doc/index.html
>
> The predicates are a bit awkward, but I wanted to be clear that this
> was to link an "Area" like "geo:44.86528100,-87.23147800;u=10" to a
> Geonames "Feature".
>
> I thought a different set of predicates could be created to deal with
> some other class of "SpatialThing" if needed.
>
> Respectfully,
>
> - Pete
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
> Pete DeVries
> Department of Entomology
> University of Wisconsin - Madison
> 445 Russell Laboratories
> 1630 Linden Drive
> Madison, WI 53706
> TaxonConcept Knowledge Base <http://www.taxonconcept.org/> /
> GeoSpecies Knowledge Base <http://lod.geospecies.org/>
> About the GeoSpecies Knowledge Base <http://about.geospecies.org/>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
--
Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer
Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
postal mail address:
VU Station B 351634
Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.
delivery address:
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Nashville, TN 37235
office: 2128 Stevenson Center
phone: (615) 343-4582, fax: (615) 343-6707
http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu
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