[Geowanking] RDF vs GML in Open Source vs Google

[Chris Goad]

Hello Chris (Holmes),

> I'm not sure _why_ I want to inject information into the innards of a
> GML file?  I think I'd prefer to visualize them, maybe modify some, and
> maybe perform some analysis.  If I run my analysis, finding patterns in
> crime statistis and desert turtle migrations, then I'd create new
> geographic information as a result, no?  I wouldn't inject it back into
> the original files.

Ok,  in this scenario, as you are working along with this melange of geo and
turtle-specific data, are you maintaining the geo data separately in GML,
and turtle specifics in some other format?  Of course this is workable, but
fails to standardize the way that the non-geographic content is tied to the
geographic content. If this isn't what you mean - if you mean GML to be the
central representation for all of the data, geo or not,  then we do have
what I was calling "injection" of other kinds of data into GML (even if not
the original files), requiring a turtle application schema.

With  the automated machinery that you refer to,  application schemas no
doubt  become much less of a burden. But the direction being taken here is
one of absorbing every application area that impinges on geography into GML;
ie GML is inevitably being positioned as a general data representation, in
effective competition with RDF.  I am convinced that RDF  (+ OWL, SPARQL,..)
is the  better technical candidate for this general task, because it is
simple, clean, and built from the outset  with this generality in mind. The
better technical candidate does not always win however!

>   If you'd like you're more
> than welcome to hack GeoServer to return RDFGeom2d as an output format,
> and I imagine MapServer would probably let you do the same

Yes, this sounds like a good direction - thanks.

-- Chris (Goad)