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

[Ed Laurent]

I'll throw a fourth option out there. It's something that several groups I'm
associated with have been considering to better coordinate the collection
and organization of ecological data, and there is precedent but it never
really caught on. How about creating a hierarchically nested global grid
composed of squares, hexagons, or other shape with unique identifiers that
locate them within space and the hierarchy. This would allow someone to use
your option #1 AND consistently describe the spatial precision regardless of
administrative or other boundaries. The grid itself is easy enough to create
but there are considerations of projection, spatial precision (I lean
towards 15 m), etc. How to implement it in a way that is user-friendly is a
big question as well.

-Ed


On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 4:57 PM, John Giannandrea <jg at metaweb.com> wrote:

>
> 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
>
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