It's strange I did not blog about this locative packet thing which is tremendously interesting because of lcoation/xml/rdf/foaf :) It is about collaborative geoannotation at a Collaborative Mapping workshop at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology 2004 conference in San Diego, CA
The workshop's aggregator will offer a REST interface with a simple RDF/XML format for geoannotations, 'locative packets', with, we hope, the following aims:
- A simple XML serialisation that different applications can produce and consume, without even having to be RDF-aware.
- A shared 'protocol' which different applications can accept and send via HTTP POST, Jabber, ...
- Simple guidelines for RDF vocabularies to use in geoannotation.
Omitting the header which declares XML namespaces, this is a complete locative packet, in outline.
1: <locative:Packet> 2: 3: <geo:long>-0.0104</geo:long> 4: <geo:lat>51.2377</geo:lat> 5: 6: <dc:title>Greenwich Observatory</dc:title> 7: <dc:description>It gets windy up there sometimes.</dc:description> 8: 9: <foaf:maker> 10: <foaf:Person foaf:mbox="mailto:jo@frot.org"/> 11: </foaf:maker> 12: 13: </locative:Packet>
lines 3/4: WGS84 latitude and longitude, in decimal format
lines 6/7: title of, and text description of, your annotatation, using terms from the Dublin Core metadata initiative.
lines 9/11: the annotation is attributed to a person, using terms from the FOAF vocabulary for people.
If you want to annotate a space with more than text, packets can be annotated with media objects of any kind - Image, Sound, MovingImage, InteractiveResource etc. We offer the DCMI Type vocabulary provided by Dublin Core as a way of typing mediafor this purpose.
Here is an example in full of a locative packet with media object attached; it doesn't get more complex than this.
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2001/02/rdf-schema#" xmlns:geo="http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#" xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:locative="http://locative.net/etcon2004/loc#" xmlns:media="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/" >
<locative:Packet>
<geo:long>-0.0104</geo:long> <geo:lat>51.5722</geo:lat>
<dc:title>Greenwich Observatory</dc:title> <dc:description>A cool but quite clear October afternoon in Greenwich Park.</dc:description> <dc:date>2003-10-15T13:45:31+01:00</dc:date>
<foaf:maker> <foaf:Person foaf:mbox_sha1sum="c43ff6d043d3f72a7e94640aa036f654eaed804b"/> </foaf:maker>
<locative:media> <media:Image rdf:about="http://iconocla.st/photo/2003/10/12/img_0299-m.jpg" dc:format="image/jpeg"/> </locative:media>
<rdfs:seeAlso rdf:resource="http://iconocla.st/photo/2003/10/12/img_0299.html"/>
</locative:Packet> </rdf:RDF>