The Non Golden Rules of Geo
Nice blog post from Yahoo! explaning why geography (especially GB geography) is so complicated. The post highlights the six non golden rules of geo:
- Any attempt to codify a series of geo rules into a formal, one size fits all, taxonomy will fail due to Rule 2.
- Geo is bizarre, odd, eclectic and utterly human.
- People will in the main agree with Rule 1 with the exception of the rules governing their own region, area or country, which they will think are perfectly logical.
- People will, in the main, think that postal, administrative and colloquial hiearachies are one and the same thing and will overlap.
- Taking Rule 4 into account, they will then attempt to codify a one size fits all geo taxonomy.
- There is no Rule 6, see Rule 1.
I think this could well explain the headache I am getting trying to write an ontology of GB geographies.
Update: Gary Gale has reproduced the original blog entry here.
Categories: Semantic Web
Geography, Yahoo!
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Thanks for the write-up, glad you liked the 6 rules!
Best
Gary Gale, Yahoo! Geo Technologies
Ah… The Heideggerian ontology issue summed up as a series of rules! Of course, Aristotle would take issue with these and say that we are just confused and missing the real, correct ontology.