Hi,

Thanks for the info, but it's not quite what I'm looking for. We've
established authority control for ancient places, but I'm looking for an
ontology I can use to describe the child:parent relationship between city
and region or region and larger region (in any way that isn't
dcterms:partOf). Geonames has defined their own vocabulary that can't
really be reused in other geographic contexts, e.g. with gn:countryCode,
gn:parentCountry.

Thanks,
Ethan

On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 11:40 AM, Karen Coyle <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Also, there is Geonames (http://www.geonames.org), which is the primary
> geographic data set on the Semantic Web. Here is the link to Athens:
>
> http://www.geonames.org/**search.html?q=athens&country=**GR<http://www.geonames.org/search.html?q=athens&country=GR>
>
> kc
>
>
> On 4/6/12 4:54 PM, Karen Miller wrote:
>
>> Ethan, have you considered Getty's Thesaurus of Geographic Names? It
>> does provide a geographic hierarchy, although the data for Athens they
>> provide isn't quite the one you've described:
>>
>> http://www.getty.edu/vow/**TGNHierarchy?find=athens&**
>> place=&nation=&prev_page=1&**english=Y&subjectid=7001393<http://www.getty.edu/vow/TGNHierarchy?find=athens&place=&nation=&prev_page=1&english=Y&subjectid=7001393>
>>
>> This vocabulary is available in XML here:
>>
>> http://www.getty.edu/research/**tools/vocabularies/obtain/**index.html<http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/obtain/index.html>
>>
>> I have looked at it but not used it; it's a big tangled mess of XML.
>>
>> MODS mimics a hierarchy (the subject/hierarchicalGeographic element has
>> these children: continent, country, province, region, state, territory,
>> county, city, island, area, extraterrestrialArea, citySection). The VRA
>> Core location element provides a similar mapping.
>>
>> I try to stay away from Dublin Core, but I did venture onto the DC Terms
>> page just now and saw TGN listed in the vocabulary encoding schemes there,
>> so probably someone has implemented it.
>>
>> Karen
>>
>>
>> Karen D. Miller
>> Monographic/Digital Projects Cataloger
>> Bibliographic Services Dept.
>> Northwestern University Library
>> Evanston, IL
>> [log in to unmask]
>> 847-467-3462
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]**EDU<[log in to unmask]>]
>> On Behalf Of Ethan Gruber
>> Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2012 12:49 PM
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: [CODE4LIB] Representing geographic hiearchy in linked data
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I have a dilemma that needs to be sorted out. I'm looking for an
>> ontology that can describe geographic hierarchy, and hopefully someone on
>> the list has experience with this. For example, if I have an RDF record
>> that describes Athens, I want to point Athens to Attica, and Attica to
>> Greece, and so on. The current proposal is to use dcterms:partOf, but the
>> problem with this is that our records will also use dcterms:partOf to
>> describe a completely different type of relational concept, and it will be
>> almost impossible for scripts to recognize the difference between these two
>> uses of the same DC term.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Ethan
>>
>
> --
> Karen Coyle
> [log in to unmask] http://kcoyle.net
> ph: 1-510-540-7596
> m: 1-510-435-8234
> skype: kcoylenet
>