[Data-modeling] Geosearch service (was Re: Modeling uncertainty)

[Tom Morris]

Thanks Faye.  I was aware of that service and had explicitly searched,
unsuccessfully, for information on it, so I appreciate the pointer.
You might want to add it to
https://www.freebase.com/view/freebase/metaweb_api_service and
http://www.freebase.com/view/guid/9202a8c04000641f80000000092a10a0

While I'll definitely check out the new service, my original comment
was about the modeling side of things, not the query side of things.
For example, the National Park Service's National Register of Historic
Places has a boolean flag on their locations called "Vicinity."  If
this flag is set True in their database, there's no way to record that
location in Metaweb.  It's also not uncommon in the historical record
to have locations recorded imprecisely saying, for example, that
someone was from "near Oxford" when they lived in an outlying village
or farm.  Recording the location as "Oxford" is inaccurate, but the
alternative is to just drop the location altogether and lose
information.

Tom

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 8:17 PM, Faye Harris <faye at metaweb.com> wrote:
> Hi Tom,
>
> This just caught my attention.
>
> For location-related queries, are you aware of Freebase's
> /api/service/geosearch? Given a search query and some geographical
> requirement, it returns you results that match your search phrase and
> fit your geographical requirement. Specifically, you can use the
> parameter "within" to pass in "a floating pointing number denoting the
> radius in kilometers searched from the anchor location".
>
> For example, the following query returns restaurants within 20km of
> Boston (city center):
> http://freebase.com/api/service/geosearch?location=/en/boston_massachusetts&type=/dining/restaurant&within=20&indent=1
>
> Does that meet your needs? Documentation for /api/service/geosearch is
> available at:
> http://freebase.com/api/service/geosearch?help
>
> -- Faye
>
>
> Tom Morris wrote:
>> Location - If I'm told that something is "near" or "in the vicinity
>> of" a location, currently my choices are to either not record the fact
>> or to guess at a way to reduce the precision in a way that's still
>> accurate.  I could say that something which is "near Boston" is "in
>> Massachusetts," but a) that might not be true and b) that's not the
>> information that I have.
>
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