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mcwdsi / geographical-entity-ontology

An ontology and inventory of geopolitical entities (such as sovereign states and their administrative subdivisions) as well as various geographical regions (including but not limited to the specific ones over which the governments have jurisdiction)
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question: how does this project relate to geonames? #31

Open justin2004 opened 1 month ago

justin2004 commented 1 month ago

geonames (in RDF) seems to do something similar to this project. and i see this project has the file iris-for-parsing-geonames.txt.

how do the two projects relate?

hoganwr commented 4 weeks ago

It's a great question. I started the Geographical Entity Ontology based on the insight that the nation (or US state or admin1 of other countries, or US county or admin2 of other countries, etc.) is an organization that is ultimately distinct from the territory (dirt, rocks, lakes, trees, mountains, valleys, rivers, etc.) over which it has jurisdiction. Examples include governments in exile, the change in territory of the US government over time, the change in territory of Adams County Colorado when it had a piece carved out for the current Denver airport, etc.

I had planned on using other resources for the territory and constraining GEO just to the organizations. But then I thought other resources were conflating the two. So I started creating individuals for the territories too. To cover regions I needed for the MIDAS Coordination Center project in an automated fashion (didn't have the manual labor to mint them anew), I started parsing them from GeoNames and assigned GeoNames IDs as alternate IDs.

In subsequent discussions with others esp. Chris Mungall, we believe ultimately one good path forward for the OBO community is to use Wikidata (I think we settled on Wikidata, I would need to double check) for RDF-based representations of geographical regions.

Also, I am no longer with the MIDAS Coordination Center as of July 1 this year. Even prior to then, my need for maintenance of this project died down considerably. It's been somewhat dormant to date, but Matt Diller and I have been discussing its future and are working on fixing a few things and considering how to manage it in the future.

So, I am not actively creating anything from GeoNames, and have no current plans to do so in the future. I would say my plan is NOT to do so any more. Also not relating anything to GeoNames at the moment.

I think geonames in RDF may have been around for awhile, and I couldn't say necessarily why I rejected it (I don't recall, my best guess is that I thought it too was conflating organizations with fiat object parts of the Earth). It does make me curious to see how they're representing things...

On Sat, Aug 17, 2024 at 4:40 PM Justin Dowdy @.***> wrote:

geonames (in RDF) https://www.geonames.org/ontology/documentation.html seems to do something similar to this project. and i see this project has the file iris-for-parsing-geonames.txt.

how do the two projects relate?

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