Propose how authoring metadata should be included

[FransKnibbe]

Contributed by Mathias Bonduel and Anna Wagner for the white paper "Benefits of Representing Spatial Data using Semantic and Graph Technologies":

In AEC, authoring metadata (e.g. author, date, revision, etc.) is of high relevance for multiple aspects of collaboration, such as coordination and legal issues. Hence, the domains requires authoring metadata to be attached to any kind of information -- and with geometry oftentimes being the core structure for non-geometric information -- this is even more important for geometry descriptions. To avoid inconsistent and varying attachments of authoring metadata, we suggest to formulate a best practice for enhancing GeoSPARQL triples with authoring information, ideally by reusing existing concepts of provenance ontologies, e.g. PROV-O, DCTerms, etc.

[dr-shorthair]

How would you associate such information with axioms? Reification?

[mathib]

I think this was a contribution of @AnnaWagner and I. We solved this using n-ary relations with our OMG ontology. More in detail: we allow users to define three types of links to geometry, also called the "three OMG levels of complexity": https://w3id.org/omg#desc. Only in Level 2 and 3, you have an instance of omg:Geometry to which you can attach metadata. Notice that OMG L2 is very similar to GeoSPARQL. What we asked for, is to consider a recommended set of metadata properties in GeoSPARQL that people can use to annotate their geometry in an interoperable manner (either directly reuse existing concepts of other ontologies, or by redefining but aligning them to existing concepts).

[mathib]

Also see issue https://github.com/opengeospatial/geosemantics-dwg/issues/49

[FransKnibbe]

I have included the names of Mathias and Anna in the issue description (thanks for the provenance data!).
I wonder: is this issue only about establishing a common way how to encode things? Or is it possible to think of expressions that really aren't possible with GeoSPARQL in its current state?

[mathib]

I have included the names of Mathias and Anna in the issue description (thanks for the provenance data!).

Thanks! I've added them also to the other issues.

I wonder: is this issue only about establishing a common way how to encode things? Or is it possible to think of expressions that really aren't possible with GeoSPARQL in its current state?

It's the first, as annotations can already be added to a geosparql:Geometry instance, but everyone can just add whatever they want, making the annotations vague and less interoperable. A list of recommended metadata properties (incl. examples related to geometry) would help

[mathib]

added to the OGC standards tracker: http://ogc.standardstracker.org/show_request.cgi?id=631

[jabhay]

MoSCoW poll created

[FransKnibbe]

Would it be wise to include a best practice description in a specification such as GeoSPARQL? One could argue it is out of scope, and more fitting to include in the Spatial Data on the Web Best Practices document..

[jabhay]

The working group would like to defer this to 1.2 or beyond, and liaise with the W3C Spatial Data on the Web working group on recommended best practices for recording provenance and attribution of spatial data.

[jabhay]

We've decided to attribute at the specification/document level. There are still some attribute level attributions that need to be removed.

• Remove attribute-level attributions.

[jabhay]

Remaining task was split into #352