Hi Gerry and Ron,
My purpose was not to say that we must use gazetteers. Sorry if this
was misunderstood. When I read metadata I found the name of the
"ultimate" feature of interest in places like keywords or in the
description (or abstract), so this is common but is not machine
readable. And, of course the geographic place could be calculated by
the location of the observation.
The result of the observation or the observing procedure could contain
the semantics about the result ( profile,station etc..). So, I find
the feature of interest a good place to put the name of a place or the
earth realm. The former could link to other information about that
place ( e.g. economic data, history, events, etc.. ). About the
later, within OOSTethys we just say that the feature of interest is a
"body of water". Using earth realms will help connect different
domains in more semantic fashion, but its not the only way to do it.
Agreeing on data/observation representation models among groups like
Galeon, OOSTethys, CSML and SWE should be the first priority in the
agenda. For example how to represent an observation result within SWE
that conforms to the well define CSML feature types ?
Not need to worry about gazetteers and earth realms, for the moment.
-Luis
On Mar 14, 2008, at 9:14 AM, Gerry Creager wrote:
Ron,
Luis made reference to use of gazetteers for place reference, or
selection of an earth realm. Similarly, Simon made reference to,
among others, use of the SWEET ontology (by way of reference to
"convenience features"). Neither of these is common in the
geosciences. We might gain some support over time by training
geoscientists in the concepts of interoperability but I'm afraid
that, at this time, it's not happening.
What I'm worried about here, and what I seem to be hearing is that
our work to understand the abstractions is embracing the areas we're
most comfortable with, and thinking those will directly transfer to
other disciplines.
I could, again, be missing the point. Perhaps the comment of
imposing a "geospatial viewpoint" was misplaced, but it looks to me
like we're trying to tell others how they will have to represent
their view of their science.
gerry
