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

[John Giannandrea]

Tom Morris wrote:
> I way to explicitly encode the degree of uncertainty may be useful in
> certain circumstances (e.g. if you've got something like the GPS
> dilution of precision to work with), but in the vast majority of the
> cases that information is not going to be available.  In those cases,
> all that's really needed is a place to store the flag that says this
> isn't the actual location, but rather a proxy which is "near," for
> some value of near, the actual location.

Well I can think of three options to capture this:

1/ use the next highest level of location, so if its 'near' /en/ 
oxford, say the location is /en/oxfordshire
     this should always be available as the /location/location/ 
containedby property

2/ we add a property to /location/location called 'approximate' and  
then have to create lots of 'nearby oxford' topics.

3/ every property that has an expected type location id denormalized  
so there is an approximate_location property too.

Of the three of these, #1 seems least ugly and most correct.

-jg