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.
"
(Via Geospatial
Semantic Web Blog.)