[foaf-dev] SPARQL GEO and SQL GIS extensions
Dan Brickley
danbri at danbri.org
Mon Jan 28 19:26:59 GMT 2008
(switched the subject line, now we're talking tech)
Paul Scott wrote:
>> Talking of cool projects, and getting offtopic for this thread, I see
>> you have some PHP/PostGIS work,
>> http://gforge2.uwc.ac.za/projects/postgis/ ... I was wondering if you or
>> others had ever looked into possibility of integrating this with SPARQL
>> for querying.
>
> Sounds tempting...
>
>> I asked Richard Cyganiak about this recently, eg. idea of
>> taking D2RQ, and improving it to have knowledge of POSTGIS SQL
>> extensions. D2RQ can rewrite SPARQL queries into SQL, so I was wondering
>> if things like http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/ontology/ and
>> http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/geo/
>> http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/geo/XGR-geo-20071023/
>> http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/geo/XGR-geo-ont-20071023/ ... could
>> benefit from this as an implementation technique? Any thoughts? Am just
>> thinking out of loud here.
>
> Well, it so happens that the other day I was thinking about exactly
> this, so I sat down and wrote a GeoRSS module for the Chisimba Framework
> http://avoir.uwc.ac.za/avoir/index.php?module=cms&action=viewsection&id=gen12Srv48Nme23_82
> (which I wrote a FOAF module as well as the start of a Semantic Campus
> add-on for as well).
Oh, nice :) Is the FOAF module online somewhere? I had search/browse
around but couldn't find it yet.
The next step I thought would be to munge the
> geoRSS generated points, polygons and linestrings into meaningful FOAF
> triples as well all for context.
I forgot one more link. Leigh Dodds (cc:'d) had some Jena extension code
for such queries. Unfortunately he lost a domain name, so the files are
currently only in archive.org links:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070219012657/http://xmlarmyknife.org/blog/archives/000281.html
(Leigh - any luck fixing the domain name? not sure if archive.org has
all your stuff)
> This is certainly an avenue that I would like to explore further, as
> soon as I have some time that is (I only get to hack around with
> geography and SW in my spare time unfortunately).
I've always thought geo and semweb a particularly good pairing, since SW
thrives on cross-domain, and geographic restriction is one way of
narrowing down application focus (eg. to a city, region etc) while
keeping the cross-domain information mixing that semweb does so well. I
hope you find some hacking time :)
> It would be great to get in touch with some others that may be
> interested and see what we can come up with.
Likewise. I've not much hands-on experience with D2RQ nor the GIS
extensions to Postgres or MySQL yet. But if I can find a way to help I'd
be happy to!
cheers,
Dan
> Thanks for the links, that looks like a pretty decent starting point at
> least!
ps. http://esw.w3.org/topic/GeoInfo might be a handy place to keep
collaborative notes, although it looks like it needs an update. GeoURL
is long gone...
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