GeoNames Forum

OK. I suppose that if at some point we agree upon an ontology, A RDF file would be OK.

A first draft of a geonames RDF-OWL ontology is available at
http://perso.orange.fr/universimmedia/geo/geonames_v0.rdf

At the end of the file are some instances. Note that, as explained before, the features are modeled as skos:Concepts. There are only a few examples of them in the file. The whole set of features I can deliver as a separate SKOS file. Using SKOS concepts make it possible to further organise the features in a proper hierarchical thesaurus, if needed.

I recommend browsing the RDF in SWOOP 2.3. with which it was edited. See http://www.mindswap.org/2004/SWOOP/ for download.

Comments waited and welcome.

PS : the model used has no cardinality restriction so far, so a place can have several features. Actually in the ontology the primitive object is a place, and the feature a separate concept. Hence the flexibility

OK so you would recommend to use, at least for english Wikipedia, the standard dms templates generated by http://de.giswiki.net/hjl_get_CoorE.htm
And if I remember well, as long as the english Wikipedia article is geotagged, the matching articles in other languages are also harvested, right?

Hello

There are (too) many templates to insert coordinates in Wikipedia. See current discussion of this issue at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Geographical_coordinates . And this is for english Wikipedia only ... every other language uses its own templates ...

I was wondering which templates are effectively taken into account by geonames import of Wikipedia dump, and which one(s) are recommended to use in Wikipedia (en, fr ...) to be sure that they will be harvested correctly.

See for example coordinates included in the infobox for every French commune in fr Wikipedia, see e.g., http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillestre . I guess the format is not supported, since the articles having coordinates formatted this way do not appear in geonames wikipedia links.

I'm interested too, but, well, maybe I missed something, but where can I find a template/schema/whatever for the csv file?

OK Marc. I'll try to find the bandwidth for a first draft in the days to come. We have to agree on the namespace to use for classes and properties. I suggest http://www.geonames.org/ontology#
I have thought about the way to deal with features and codes, and my current idea is to model the feature main categories (letters) as subclasses of "SpatialThing", and subcategories as property values, if they are likely to be extensible and moving. Another idea in such a case is to have feature subcategories organised as a SKOS vocabulary. How stable are feature codes?

And again, forgot to login for the previous post

Forgot that login into geonames is not login into the forum. I am the anonymous

Hello all

Has anybody thought about providing geonames information in RDF, since it seems completely ready for migration to the Semantic Web.
Each geoname has an unique that could be easily transformed into a unique URI like http://www.geonames.org#3014258. Maybe there is already something alike in store?

The structure of features codes can easily migrated into some class/subclass structure in an OWL ontology, for example :

<owl:Class rdf:about="http://www.geonames.org/onto#P">
<rdfs:comment xml:lang="en">city, village, ...</rdfs:comment>
<rdfs:subClassOf rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#SpatialThing"/>
</owl:Class>

<owl:Class rdf:about="http://www.geonames.org/onto#PPL">
<rdfs:comment xml:lang="en">a city, town, village, or other agglomeration of buildings where people live and work</rdfs:comment>
<rdfs:label xml:lang="en">populated place</rdfs:label>
<rdfs:subClassOf rdf:resource="http://www.geonames.org/onto#P"/>
</owl:Class>

Using the wgs84_pos:SpatialThing class as a generic class allows to use location properties wgs84_pos:lat, wgs84_pos:long and wgs84_pos:alt. Other attributes like population, postal code, wikipedia article, ... can also be easily added as RDF properties.

If there is interest in this, I can provide a full ontology in OWL format, and some instances in RDF. Having RDF data available through geonames Web Services would be very cool indeed (along with the regular XML format).

Thoughts?

Ach, wunderbach

BTW would be a good idea for Wikipedia, a bot adding the coordinates found in one page to the equivalent page(s) in other languages.

Hello Marc

My question is sort of dual of Szymon.

I understand the logic of Wikipedia articles being included as long as they are geo-tagged. But how come some Wikipedia articles are included whereas no geotagging can be found in the article?
See e.g. http://www.geonames.org/maps/google_44.3266_6.8072.html and look for french Wikipedia
You find the two entries
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Col_de_la_Bonette
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Col_de_Restefond
The latter redirects to the former in Wikipedia, by the way, and neither contains the faintest mark of geotagging as far as I can tell.

How does the miracle occur? Is it possible to manually add a Wikipedia entry?