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

This vocabulary is available in XML here:

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 
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847-467-3462




-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[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