August 07, 2003
URI for postal codes?
What about making use of a URI for postal codes? Something like this:
<near rdf:resource="http//ideaspace.net/postal/us#20817"/>
The idea being that the leading portion of the URI, presumably backed by a schema, would be the indicator it's a postal system oriented bit of information. Then make use of the standard two (or three) letter country codes. The fragment is the actual code.
Note, I'm also suggesting a &;lt;near/> element type. An example using it might look like this:
<foaf:Person rdf:resource="http://www.ideaspace.net/users/wkearney/foaf.xrdf#wkearney99">
<near rdf:resource="http//ideaspace.net/postal/us#20817"/>
</foaf:Person/>
Here the markup is saying the foaf:Person for Bill is near US zipcode 20817. So if anything wanted to quickly find someone near a give place a query for the nearest postal code would bring up anything using the element. Note that using this wouldn't be restricted to just a person element. It'd probably be just as useful on groups, organizations, projects or any number of other things wanting to express location nearness information.
I could just as easily see this being useful for the airport codes as well.
Hi Bill -
I like the idea very much. Isn't there already a namespace for GeoURL-formatted codes? Would it perhaps be possible to fold them all together into one single "location" module? Might make it useful to have them all in one place like that, rather than requiring more and more namespaces.
Just a thought. I like the idea regardless. :)
- Chad.
Posted by: Chad Everett on August 8, 2003 06:35 AMThere isn't as easy a way to do lat/long codes. The beauty of using a URI like this is the leading characters search functions in most environments will be pretty fast. Doing the same with lat/long pairs is a little more involved. That said, the resolving of the URI that I'll be using will be returning some RDF results. As part of that will be lat/long and other data.
Posted by: Bill Kearney on August 8, 2003 07:12 AMBill,
This sounds a lot like it could work with the spacenamespace project - http://space.frot.org/ and http://dk.space.frot.org/ . The problem though is assigning a single set of coordinates to a region...
Also, FoaF has a "based_near" property, which seems to have almost the same semantics as what your "near" suggests (and the same as opencyc's "near").
