Linking your Geonames place from your FOAF file

Now that we have a large database of places on the Semantic Web, I want to link to my place from my FOAF file.

To find a place, go to geonames.org, enter the name in the search box, find the right place on the result page.

geonames.org search result page for “berlin”

Click the small multicolored place markers near the left border (not the place name). A map will appear, with a marker and box showing the place.

geonames.org map showing Berlin

The box contains a link “semantic web rdf”. Copy the link. That’s your place.

I added this triple to my personal RDF data:

<http://richard.cyganiak.de/foaf.rdf#cygri>
    foaf:based_near <http://ws.geonames.org/rdf?geonameId=2950159> .

Now, when I load my URI in Tabulator, it lets me navigate from my profile up the geographical hierarchy from the city of Berlin to the federal state of Berlin to the country of Germany to the continent of Europe.

I’m not perfectly happy with using foaf:based_near, because I’m not based near Berlin, dammit, I’m based right in the middle of it. Is there a more appropriate and reasonably well-established property?

3 Responses to “Linking your Geonames place from your FOAF file”

  1. Semantic Web « Geonames Says:

    […] Thanks to the Geonames Ontology, contributed by Bernard Vatant, all geonames features now have a RDF description for the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web aims to bring structure to the Web and make its content easily readable by machines. The semantic web is sometimes referred to as Web3.0. The balloon on the geonames map display has received two new menus for ‘perma link’ and ’semantic web rdf’. Harry Chen has a good introduction to the Geonames Ontology on the Geospatial Semantic Web Blog. Richard Cyganiak writes in his blog “This is an excellent example of a Semantic Web site done right. Well, almost right …” and in an other posting he describes how to use the Semantic Web URI of a geonames feature with a FOAF file : Now, when I load my URI in Tabulator, it lets me navigate from my profile up the geographical hierarchy from the city of Berlin to the federal state of Berlin to the country of Germany to the continent of Europe. Posted by marc Filed in Uncategorized […]

  2. Semantic Web : Concept vs Document « Geonames Says:

    […] With feedback and help from the blogosphere we have updated the geonames ontology and fixed some flaws in the corresponding web service. The ontology now includes linked data such as contains (administrative divisions), neighbours (for features with a boundary) or nearby features. The web service is using two URIs to clearly distinguish between Concept (the thing as is) and Document (the document about it). […]

  3. dowhatimean.net » Linking your Geonames place from your FOAF file Says:

    […] http://dowhatimean.net/2006/10/linking-your-geonames-place-from-your-foaf-file Tags: foaf, geonames(del.icio.us history) […]

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