[georss] Geolocation by reference

[Sean Gillies]

Josh,

Yes, we've considered using atom:link like this, specifically with
rel="http://pleiades.stoa.org/relations/isColocatedWith" (or something
like that). I'm not opposed to reinventing RDF like this at all. I
suggested a src attribute for georss:where because it seems like it
would be equally useful to users of RSS 1/2.

Honestly, I don't like georss:featurename or georss:featuretypetag much
at all for Atom. atom:category makes the latter pointless, and either
atom:link or georss:where[@src] can take over from the former.

Cheers,
Sean

Joshua Lieberman wrote:
> Sean,
> 
> This is pretty similar to the idea behind georss:featurename, a  
> qualified name which is resolvable to feature coordinates.  
> Geonames.org is one source of such names, although they don't have to  
> be placenames per se. In many cases, a direct link isn't so useful  
> because the authoritative geometry isn't the right type or scale for  
> the feed entries (e.g. detailed multi-polygon -> box), but could  
> perhaps be extracted or updated automatically as needed.
> 
> atom:link elements are also being used to reference authoritative  
> feature definitions for various purposes, e.g.
> 
> <link rel="http://www.geobase.ca/linktype/sourcefeature" href="http:// 
> wfs.geobase.ca? 
> service=WFS&version=1.1.0&request=GetFeature&featureid=admin.boundary. 
> 1M.muni.ottawa"/>
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Josh
> 
> On Nov 9, 2007, at 6:59 PM, Sean Gillies wrote:
> 
>> GeoRSS has literal locations well covered. A possible use case for
>> location by reference (hyperlink really) is coming up in my work and I
>> want to run it by this group.
>>
>> My Pleiades project is collaborating with other digital classics
>> projects to build out an ancient history web. Pleiades aims to be the
>> authoritative gazetteer for the Greek and Roman civilizations; we
>> maintain place name and locations resources that can be linked to from
>> other projects for geographic context. For example, see this page  
>> on the
>> American Numismatic Society web site about a coin from the Xanthos  
>> mint:
>>
>> http://publicserver.numismatics.org/collection/accnum/list? 
>> accnum=1977.158.477&single=1
>>
>> The developers of the site are harvesting coordinates from the  
>> Pleiades
>> Xanthos record (http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/639166) and will be
>> turning them around for use in their own GeoRSS feed (of mints). It
>> works, but it's a fair amount of effort that has to be reimplemented
>> from site to site across our little history web.
>>
>> I think there may be cause here to add more declarative syntax to the
>> georss:where element. My initial idea is that georss:where could  
>> have an
>> optional src attribute exactly as atom:content can. The value of  
>> the src
>> attribute should be the URI of a GML document. Like so:
>>
>>   <atom:entry>
>>   ...
>>   <where src="http://example.com/locations/1.gml"/>
>>   </atom:entry>
>>
>> where the resource at http://example.com/locations/1.gml would be
>>
>>   ...
>>   <gml:Point>...</gml:Point>
>>
>> In this way the numismatists can reuse the authoritative Pleiades
>> locations and need neither maintain their own duplicate database nor
>> continually synch against Pleiades resources. The synchronization  
>> could
>> become built in.
>>
>> There is precedent in Atom for remote sourcing, but only to my  
>> knowledge
>> for atom:content. The src attribute feels pretty good to me, though  
>> I do
>> think that it has the potential to make location (which is metadata) a
>> bit too much of content (data). Does anybody have other ideas for
>> non-literal locations?
>>
>> Sean
>>