Geonames marches foward with ontology v1.2: "
Geonames announced the release of its Geonames ontology v1.2. The new ontology has few enhancements. It introduced the notion of linked data and made clear distinction between URI that intended for linking documents and for linking ontology concepts.
Different types of geospatial data are of different spatial granularity. Data of different spatial granularity may relate to each other by the containment relation. For example, countries contain states, states contains cities and so on. Some geospatial data are of the similar spatial granularity (e.g., two cities that are nearby each other, or two countries that are neighboring each other). To support the knowledge representation of these relationships, the ontology introduced three new properties: childreanFeatures, nearbyFeatures and neighbouringFeatures.
In the Semantic Web, both ontology concepts and physical web documents are linked by URI. Sometimes in applications, it’s useful to make clear whether the use of a URI is intended for linking documents or for linking ontology concepts. The new Geonames ontology introduced a URI convention for identifying the intended usage of a URI. This convention also simplifies the discovering of geospatial data using Geonames web services.
Here is an example:
Other interesting ontology properties include wikipediaArticle and locationMap. The former links a Feature instance to a Web article on Wikipedia, and the latter links a Feature instance to a digital map Web page.
For additional information about Geonames ontology v1.2, see Marc’s post at the Geonames blog.
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(Via Geospatial Semantic Web Blog.)