What if feature of interest is private?

The conceptual model for a POI requires a "hasFeatureOfInterest" property which is meant to be an identification (link? URI?) to a Feature in some underlying collection of features that the POI view is a simplification of.

What if the use case for a POI set is interchange with other parties, and the Feature of Interest is a feature in some private database that is not intended to be shared? Then the hasFeatureOfInterest link would not resolve to anything useful for the external party consuming the POI set.

There seem to be several choices: 1) Make hasFeatureOfInterest be optional. Assume that the provider of the POI feature set has its own private way of connecting this POI to their internal Feature Set (if they even need that capability). One way, for instance, would be to use a featureID for the POI that the providing party knows how to map into their internal underlying Feature set. 2) Allow the hasFeatureOfInterest property to be a generic URI that resolves to, say, the home page of the provider of the POI set. This has the advantage that the URI resolves to something, but the disadvantage that it won't uniquely identify the underlying feature. (Maybe nobody needs that abiility? As discussed in choice 1, the provider could use different means of mapping the POI feature to their internal feature; and the external party is not allowed to access the underlying feature anyway.) 3) Require the hasFeatureOfInterest property to uniquely identify the underlying feature, but not require that an external party be able to fetch anything from that URI. E.g., it could be something like http://ourorg.com/ourpois/234153 where 234153 is some feature id that is meaningful to the provider, and at least provides a uniqueness key to the consumer. In many cases I am aware of, I would just use the same id number here that is used in the feature ID for the POI feature.

My preference would be choice 1, but others may disagree.

opengeospatial / poi

What if feature of interest is private? #109