Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

UMBC Ebiquity Group reports how W3C geo vocabulary is currently used in semantic web documents. The analysis is done using the statistics compiled by Swoogle — a Semantic Web search engine and crawler. Swoogle currently knows about 500,000 semantic web documents and 300,000,000 RDF triples.

Some interesting facts from the report:

• Geo is currently the 10th highest ranked vocabulary according to Swoogle’s ontology ranking algorithm
• About 240,000 documents reference geo’s namespace
• Top used namespace abbreviation for this ontology is “geo”, “pos” and “wgs84_pos”
• Instances of geo:Point appear far more often in the range value of foaf:base_near property than all other referenced properties combined (close to 100,000 : 1).
• Property geo:long (longitude) and geo:lat (latitude) are often used by instances of geo:Point. Other instances that use these two properties include instances of the Airport class from airport-ont, geo:SpatialThing, dc:image, rdfs:Resource, foaf:Image, and foaf:Person. (see the full list for geo:long and the full list for geo:lat).
• Property geo:alt (altitude) is not used very often in comparison to geo:long and geo:lat.

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One of the most successful Semantic Web project is FOAF (the Friend of a Friend project). The goal of this project is to create a Web of machine-readable homepages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do.

In this blog, I will show how to describe location information in a FOAF profile using latitude and longitude.

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