Geonames machine tags
Reading Martin Soutschek’s question to my previous post triggered me to think of a new way to do photo geotagging. The idea is to annotate photos with machine tags that point to geonames features.
For example, you can tag Golden Gate Bridge photos with
geonames:feature=5352844
How does it work?
We know geonames produces unique URL for all feature data. This is the URL for Golden Gate Bridge in California.
http://www.geonames.org/5352844/golden-gate-bridge.html
If you point your browser to this URL, you’ll get a map that zooms to the Golden Gate Bridge. From this URL, we know that in geonames the feature Golden Gate Bridge is assigned a unique ID 5352844. In fact, you can shorten the above URL and still get to the same Golden Gate Bridge page.
http://www.geonames.org/5352844
In other words, the long URL is more suitable for the humans to read, and the short URL is more effective for the machines to identify a feature.
Now we know how geonames’s URL pattern works. We can map the above URL to flickr’s machine tag syntax.
[namespace]:[predicate]=[value]
To identify Golden Gate Brdige in geonames using the machine tag syntax, we use the the following string:
geonames:feature=5352844
Now, let’s say your photos have been uploaded to flickr, and your photos are tagged
travel bridge geonames:feature=5352844 fun
If flikr’s service is implemented to recognize geonames’s machine tag, then it can pull this semantic description from geonames.org, which is the RDF description about the Golden Gate Bridge. In this document, it describes how Golden Gate Bridge is called in different languages and other geographical information.
I imagine you can continue this example with additional geoname machine tags (e.g., tags for California, US, N. America). To find those location names, you can traverse the Geonames Ontology (defined in SKOS).
I think the question has more to do with automatically assigning hierarchical features (with labels in different languages).
Your steps are of course an integral part, but you need a few more steps!
Comment by Morten Frederiksen — March 28, 2007 @ 3:23 pm
Morten, thank you for your comment. Yes, I admit that my post didn’t really answer his question, and diverted into a somewhat different topic.
Let me revise the post a bit.
Update: Done!
Comment by harrychen — March 28, 2007 @ 5:09 pm
Harry, thanks for your update, which has answered my question
Comment by Martin Soutschek — March 28, 2007 @ 8:58 pm
[…] 29th, 2007 “Geonames machine tags” is a nice idea proposed by Harry Chen in the Geospatial Semantic Web Blog. He suggests to […]
Pingback by Geonames machine tags « Geonames — March 29, 2007 @ 3:46 pm
fantastic idea.
A remark about the URIs :
The URI for the semantic web concept is actually
http://sws.geonames.org/5352844
This URI will be forwarded to either the html document at http://www.geonames.org/5352844/golden-gate-bridge.html for web browsers or to the rdf document http://sws.geonames.org/5352844/about.rdf for rdf aware clients (content negotiation).
Comment by marc wick — March 29, 2007 @ 4:14 pm
Marc, it’s nice to hear that geonames supports content negotiation. I think the URL http://sws.geonames.org/5352844 needs a ‘/’ at the end. I’m getting 404 when hitting the link without an extra ‘/’.
Comment by harrychen — March 29, 2007 @ 4:19 pm
You are absolutely right, Harry. There should have been a slash at the end.
Comment by marc wick — March 30, 2007 @ 12:47 am
[…] Chen over at the Geospatial Semantic Web Blog has posted up a nice spring board called Geonames machine tags. In which he suggest tagging flickr photos using the format geonames:feature=5352844 to point to […]
Pingback by geobloggers » Geonames machine tags, Triplr.org and JSON, oh my! — March 31, 2007 @ 3:50 am