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Incomplete Address Paradigm?

Open swartik opened this issue 6 years ago • 2 comments

I was using the paradigm for a person's address in Modeling Information with the Common Core Ontologies (Section 4.1). It seems to me that the pattern is incomplete. It locates the geospatial region for a zip code within a state. The thing is, many such geospatial regions are located within a state – within a city, for that matter. What is the relationship between a residential facility and its zip code? Is the picture missing an additional located_in between those two individuals?

swartik avatar Oct 17 '18 17:10 swartik

The facility is located at some lot of land that is identified by the facility address. I would say I'm sure of that but there may be farms that are identified only rural route. That exception leads me to think that the person/organization/facility name is also a part of the address. Past that, the spatial relationships between lot, city, and state are pretty well behaved although there are counter-examples to be found. ZIP codes are not so well-behaved, some span multiple states and some identify organizations more that a land area (Smokey the Bear has one, 20252). So I do think its safe to say that a facility location is a proper spatial part of a region identified by ZIP code but adding those assertions don't seem to me to strengthen the identifying relation between the full address and the facility.

rorudn avatar Oct 18 '18 17:10 rorudn

I agree, but I guess I didn't make my point well. I want to write a SPARQL query that retrieves a residence's street, city, state, and zip code. If a state (or in my case, a city) is the object of multiple located-in relationships with a geospatial region as the subject, the query will return a result for each geospatial region. Asserting which geospatial region the residential facility is located in would resolve the ambiguity. Is there another way?

Also, I just noticed that the last sentence in the first paragraph of Section 4 has some extra words:

The examples were selected are intended to illustrate common mapping problems.

You could drop “are intended” or “were selected”.

swartik avatar Oct 22 '18 13:10 swartik