[okfn-help] Geographical and temporal information in Open, Correspondence

[print.crimes]

On 28/10/2010 12:00, okfn-help-request at lists.okfn.org wrote:
> Iain, very glad to hear of your progress, have a few points of reference
>
> On 27/10/2010 21:40, print.crimes wrote:
>> One of the things that I wanted to look at in Open Correspondence is the
>> spatial and temporal information that exists in the letters.
> I run a place-name text mining web service at the EDINA data centre, and
> would be more than happy to run some of your text and metadata through
> it and do a little analysis of the results.
> http://unlock.edina.ac.uk/text.html
Jo, many thanks for this. I'll certainly be contacting you soon about 
this once the current fixes and updates have been applied.
> The backend is developed by the Language Technology Group at the
> University of Edinburgh - they do some temporal/event text mining as
> well (for example, resolving "last Tuesday" to a specific date relative
> to the rest of the text, and connecting it to clusters of actions).
> I forwarded your message to LTG folk, maybe it'll spark something.
>
Thanks, I believe that you've forwarded a reply so I'll get on top of 
that today.
>> I had thought of trying to use Google maps to show the data for Collins
>> but I'm sure that there is a better way of doing it.
> OpenLayers is likely the best option for doing this with open source /
> data. http://openlayers.org/ - worth also looking at the new-ish
> http://polymaps.org/ that Stamen released with SimpleGeo for doing more
> complex visualisations with SVG overlays.
Looks fun and useful. I did like the idea of using historical maps that 
you posted on the mapping hacks site, so an embarrassment of riches to 
think about and play with for the next full release.
>> The RDF endpoint does not expose the geographical data yet as I'm not
>> sure of the best / most useful ontology to use though browsing there is
>> some W3C work and opengeospatial has various vocabularies / ontologies
> There's a GeoSPARQL standard going through the OGC right now. The effort
> is Oracle-led and so corresponds to their splinter of GeoSPARQL.
> I'm not sure if OpenLink are involved - i should join the working group
> - but i've seen/heard good things about the geographic SPARQL query
> support in Virtuoso - it's being used for http://linkedgeodata.org - the
> RDF version of OpenStreetmap.
>
>> It is not an area that I have much experience in yet (but it does seem
>> that both MySQL and Postgresql support GIS to some degree though again
>> better tools may exist)
> PostGIS is the gold standard here, really. There's also a new wave of
> spatial extensions to NoSQL stores which, if you're into the fun of the
> learning experience, would be worth looking into.
> GeoCouch for couchdb:
> http://vmx.cx/cgi-bin/blog/index.cgi/geocouch-the-future-is-now:2010-05-03:en,CouchDB,Python,Erlang,geo
> MongoDB geospatial indexing:
> http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Geospatial+Indexing
>
I've been looking at Couch so that gives me plenty to work with and 
learn once I'm up to speed in the area.

Thanks,

Iain