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:

1. Any attempt to codify a series of geo rules into a formal, one size fits all, taxonomy will fail due to Rule 2.
2. Geo is bizarre, odd, eclectic and utterly human.
3. 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.
4. People will, in the main, think that postal, administrative and colloquial hiearachies are one and the same thing and will overlap.
5. Taking Rule 4 into account, they will then attempt to codify a one size fits all geo taxonomy.
6. 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.

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