Filling A Niche

There has never a widely adopted RDF vocabulary for representing geographic shapes. Four years ago the W3C came up with a Basic Geo Vocabulary which was restricted to representing points via their latitude and longitude, but gave no specification on how to represent lines and polygon features.

The W3C Geospatial Incubator Group has just published as their final report a pair of documents on Geospatial Vocabularies and Geospatial Ontologies. In so doing they have come up with a GeoOWL ontology that includes classes for points, lines, polygons, and boxes. It is based largely on the GeoRSS specification for encoding geographical information in RSS feeds. The ontology does not have a model for spatial relationships, e.g. being able to say a feature is contained within another. Nevertheless, being able to associate geographic shapes with any other entity solves many of the semantic modelling problems associated with biodiversity data.