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

[Jonathan W. Lowe]

Tom,

Suppose you could use points, lines or polygons (or some combination of
these) to model a location that was "near Oxford".  How would you want
to mmodel it?  For example, would a circle polygon with Oxford at the
center represent an area of uncertainty for your purposes?

Jonathan

On Wed, 2009-02-25 at 22:24 -0500, Tom Morris wrote:
> 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.
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Data-modeling mailing list
> > Data-modeling at freebase.com
> > http://lists.freebase.com/mailman/listinfo/data-modeling
> >
> _______________________________________________
> Data-modeling mailing list
> Data-modeling at freebase.com
> http://lists.freebase.com/mailman/listinfo/data-modeling