Ethan, have you considered Getty's Thesaurus of Geographic Names? It does provide a geographic hierarchy, although the data for Athens they provide isn't quite the one you've described:
http://www.getty.edu/vow/TGNHierarchy?find=athens&place=&nation=&prev_page=1&english=Y&subjectid=7001393
This vocabulary is available in XML here:
http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/obtain/index.html
I have looked at it but not used it; it's a big tangled mess of XML.
MODS mimics a hierarchy (the subject/hierarchicalGeographic element has these children: continent, country, province, region, state, territory, county, city, island, area, extraterrestrialArea, citySection). The VRA Core location element provides a similar mapping.
I try to stay away from Dublin Core, but I did venture onto the DC Terms page just now and saw TGN listed in the vocabulary encoding schemes there, so probably someone has implemented it.
Karen
Karen D. Miller
Monographic/Digital Projects Cataloger
Bibliographic Services Dept.
Northwestern University Library
Evanston, IL
k-miller3_at_northwestern.edu
847-467-3462
-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:CODE4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Ethan Gruber
Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2012 12:49 PM
To: CODE4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: [CODE4LIB] Representing geographic hiearchy in linked data
Hi all,
I have a dilemma that needs to be sorted out. I'm looking for an ontology that can describe geographic hierarchy, and hopefully someone on the list has experience with this. For example, if I have an RDF record that describes Athens, I want to point Athens to Attica, and Attica to Greece, and so on. The current proposal is to use dcterms:partOf, but the problem with this is that our records will also use dcterms:partOf to describe a completely different type of relational concept, and it will be almost impossible for scripts to recognize the difference between these two uses of the same DC term.
Thanks,
Ethan
Received on Fri Apr 06 2012 - 10:55:15 EDT