GeoMarkup: Use OWL to annotate your maps?
Some posts ago Carsten was wondering about the missing proposals for a standardized way for map annotations. Here is a suggestion to utilize ontologies to add these annotations. Sounds like a great idea, Ontologies (written in OWL in this case) do not constrain you to specific properties. If you like, you are able to enrich the annotations by adding new concepts. Sure, this goes even more away from the idea of fixed standard, but on the other hand we would have a standardized way to access and to reason with the available annotations.
One bad thing though is the rather complicated (and not intuitive) way to work with these ontologies. GeoMarkup looks like a promising approach with its integration into JUMP. But the screenshots still show the xml code used in OWL. In my opinion tools which use ontologies (and the according languages) should try to hide this fact from the user. Machines might like to read RDF, I definitly not.
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