[Openstreetmap] ontology, money

[Jo Walsh]

On Sun, Mar 20, 2005 at 03:04:14AM -0800, Schuyler Erle wrote:
> BTW, has anyone looked at TIGER CFCC codes? I think they're a pretty
> thorough ontology of road types.
> http://www.topodepot.com/Docs/Doc_Tiger.htm gives an overview.

i did a bit of thinking about extending and ontologising CC codes,
though not really about the identifier-reference problem:
http://uo.space.frot.org/?MapOntology - sorry to keep draggign this up

We'd need to add road types. It would be bad to use the CFCC codes
directly (override of semantics / localisation issues). I thought
about a URI-based scheme based on CFCC, something like

http://openstreetmap.org/road/A00 ('generic' road)
http://openstreetmap.org/road/A10 (motorway)

etc. Now this loses readability: what i have been using to simply
connote road types is
http://openstreetmap.org/schema/Road
http://openstreetmap.org/schema/Motorway

Then when a new spatial object is created, it is tagged with that
class, then its description can be decorated with a set of metadata
properties, similar to a bitwise-flags approach but not space limited.

[http://uo.space.frot.org/freemap/road/19022 rdf:type map:Motorway]
[http://uo.space.frot.org/freemap/road/19023 rdf:type map:Road]
[http://uo.space.frot.org/freemap/road/19023 map:has_feature map:cycle_path]

There's probably somethign really wrong with that last bit of
modelling, sorry... :/ but this general idea...

re the sparking XML flames, i like XML because it provides a good
medium for carrying RDF statements about in that can be easily
attached to RSS etc. and as icky as Geographic Markup Language is,
the GML based map-data exchange WFS and WMS stuff i have tried has
appeared to Just Work...

re the financial/organisational stuff... we were talking about it in
the kitchen re fundholding / minimising overhead, saul suggested OKFN
could act as a fundholder/purchasing agency and rufus seemed happy to
do it, and it seemed to make a lot of sense and to be easy. i'm sorry
i didn't run the plan by properly here though. Perhaps not having to
think about association arrangements puts a brake on potentially
interested conversations we might have, but i'm unsure it's needed
yet...

    
-jo

 
> Perhaps we could extend that ontology rather than making our own out
> of whole cloth.