The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has very recently made the namespace document of the Core Location Vocabulary available on www.w3.org/ns/locn#.
The ISA Programme Location Core Vocabulary contains a set of classes and properties which capture the fundamental characteristics of a location in terms of address, geographic name, or geometry. The Core Location Vocabulary is one of three related Core Vocabularies initiated by Action 1.1 of the ISA Programme of the European Commission developed in the period December 2011 – May 2012 by the Core Vocabularies Working Group following a process and methodology based on W3C’s best practices. More than 60 people of 21 EU Member States have participated in the Core Vocabularies work. The Working Group was co-chaired by Paul Smits, Adrea Perego, and Michael Lutz of the European Commission INSPIRE team
Now that the namespace document of the Location vocabulary is available on www.w3.org/ns/locn# application developers are likely to make better use of the vocabulary. The namespace document of the Core Location Vocabulary gives it a unique, permanent, and most importantly resolvable identification. This means that each of its classes and properties are identified by a URI that can be resolved by both humans and machines over the Web. For example, the URI used for the class “Address” is http://www.w3.org/ns/locn#Address. Humans or apps that want to get information about this Class only need to resolve this URI on the Web and will get either human-readable (e.g. HTML) or machine-readable (e.g. RDF/XML) information returned.
Organisations that want to use the Core Location Vocabulary can for example use the Cookbook for Publishing Linked Data. The Core Location vocabulary was used in among others the following known applications:
- Core Location Pilot – Interconnecting Belgian Address Data (http://location.testproject.eu/BEL/)
- HuisKluis - NetAge.nl Address Mapping of the Dutch 'Building and Address' base register
- Greek Tax Authorities business registry published as linked open data using core business and core location
The W3C Location and Addresses Community Group is to review the existing efforts such as the Core Location Vocabulary and assess whether any use cases would be served by harmonization and/or new standardization work.
Related event: Joint W3C/OGC workshop: Linking Geospatial Data 2014, 5th - 6th March 2014, Campus London, Shoreditch