GeoDCAT-AP [PR]: Controlled vocabulary for location information

References

This issue has been reported by Trevor Alcorn.

http://joinup.ec.europa.eu/mailman/archives/dcat_application_profile-geo/2015-August/000187.html

In addition, people from AgID (Agenzia per l¹Italia Digitale) report a comment related to this issue:

http://joinup.ec.europa.eu/mailman/archives/dcat_application_profile-geo/2015-September/000201.html

Explanation

The proposal is to include keywords for location information where possible:

dcat:keyword

dct:place

As thesaurus references, the following ones could be considered:

• GeoNames
• SeaVoX salt and fresh water body gazetteer
• DBpedia
• National Gazetteer

For Geographic identifier, the followings Thesaurus are proposed:

• http://vocab.nerc.ac.uk/collection/C19/current/ (SeaVoX salt and fresh water body gazetteer for ‘marine geonames’
• DBpedia for Geographic Placenames
• National gazetteer vocabularies where feasible?

As AgID comment, the term "Regions, cities" in the controlled vocabulary proposed could be considered as a spatial/geographic characterization rather that a theme for the classification of datasets or catalogues. It is not comparable to "Agriculture, fisheries, forestry, food" for instance. Therefore, it is proposed to exclude "Regions, cities" from the current list of terms available.

Antonio proposes to better use geographical identifiers instead of keywords, even in view of the general criterion to cover the metadata elements of the core profile of ISO 19115 and those defined in INSPIRE. It is mainly because the metadata element Geographic Identifier is included in ISO 19115 core (as reported in Annex II.10) and is more suitable for the scope. The use of keywords means adding a new RDF Syntax bindings corresponding to a new metadata element (keyword type, necessary to let to understand that keyword identifies a location) that is not required in INSPIRE Metadata Regulation. For this reason, in most cases it is probably not considered in the use cases and in the existing implementations.

Related issues

• GeoDCAT-AP: Controlled vocabulary for marine regions
• GeoDCAT-AP: Controlled vocabulary for discipline
• GeoDCAT-AP: Controlled vocabulary for spatial resolution
• GeoDCAT-AP: Controlled vocabulary for spatial representation type
• GeoDCAT-AP: Keyword controlled vocabulary
• GeoDCAT-AP: Controlled vocabulary for frequencies
• GeoDCAT-AP: Controlled vocabulary for dcat:theme

Component

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