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Re: [ontolog-forum] Geographical ontology?

To: "[ontolog-forum]" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: Mike Bennett <mbennett@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 27 Mar 2010 17:34:51 +0000
Message-id: <4BAE41BB.5050502@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
At last year's SemTech there was a presentation from the UN FAO folks 
who have a country ontology:    (01)

http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/geoinfo.asp    (02)

These are the first people that a country writes to when it changes its 
name, I'm told. So in terms of provenance, this is the most 
authoritative. It's not ideal since it does not deal with intra-country 
concepts. Also it's a bit "design-y" for my tastes. When I asked about 
this they said they had not envisaged other types of user wanting make 
reference to this material.    (03)

If one wants to define a set of reference ontologies to use which are as 
standard as possible then I'd suggest that this should be used for 
reasons of provenance. I'm in the process of trying to integrate the EDM 
Council Semantics Repository upper ontology terms into this, for that 
reason, and replacing the "holding" terms we currently use, which you 
are welcome to look at on www.hypercube.co.uk/edmcouncil under "Global 
Terms/Geographical".    (04)

The intra-country terms are more problematic, and I'm also looking for 
what is the "most definitive" ontology for such terms, i.e. with 
provenance from a standards or governing body. The recognised authority 
on countries and country components is ISO 3166 at 
http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes.htm but unfortunately that simply 
itemises the various intra-country components without attempting to 
create common concepts (e.g. a federal province is a common concept, 
whether a given federation calls it a State, a Province, a Canton or 
whatever, subject to different legal nuances of course).    (05)

Mike    (06)

Erick Antezana wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am looking for an ontology that "captures" geographical concepts
> such as continent, country, province/state, city, and so forth, their
> "instances" (e.g. Europe, Belgium, East Flanders, Ghent) as well as
> the relationships among them (Ghent is_located in Belgium).
>
> I have found a couple of works (e.g.
> http://www.geonames.org/ontology/ontology_v2.0_Lite.rdf). Is there any
> one you could advise to look into?
>
> thanks,
> Erick
>  
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>       (07)


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Mike Bennett
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