[Buildingdata] Locating things

[Christopher Gutteridge]

I've been looking at how we locate things, specifically for where an 
item of equipment is.

Different things get described at different levels of detail, sometimes 
as that's the data we have, but also some items move around a building 
so we can't be more specific.

Also some things we wouldn't want to give too much detail about... it's 
not advisable to give too much detail in open-data on the location of 
valuable+portable items!

So as I see it we've 4 levels of resolution:
Room ,--http://vocab.deri.ie/rooms#Room <http://vocab.deri.ie/rooms#Room>
Building,  --http://vocab.deri.ie/rooms#Building 
<http://vocab.deri.ie/rooms#Building>
Site/Campus,  -- ??
City -- ??

-- I guess there's also cases for subdividing rooms and for 
county,region,country,continent,planet... but the same discussion applies.

Given that a location of a thing has a reference point lat/long or E/N, 
I want to draw it on a map, and measure distance to it.

So I'd like to know which location is more specific (which I can work 
out from x within y, y within z etc, but for the sake of ease I'd rather 
mandate a list of allowed location types and know the relative scales.)

I've been using org:Site for campuses, but this is a mistake on my part 
as this refers to the site of an organisation, and can be at any scale 
-- it doesn't have the semantic meaning I intended, so I need a class to 
recommend for campus/site & city scale locations.

And for each scale I'd like to define a rough error value. eg. the 
reference point of a room should be disregarded within 5m of it, for a 
building 20m?, a site 100m and a city 5km? I'm pulling these numbers out 
of the air, but if I'm sorting things by proximity to the highfield 
campus (in southampton)  and I have some listed as in "southampton", I'm 
not sure what to do with them.

On a map, I guess things with vague locations maybe shouldn't be shown 
on pins when you get past a certain zoom level?



-- 
Christopher Gutteridge -- http://id.ecs.soton.ac.uk/person/1248

/ Lead Developer, EPrints Project, http://eprints.org/
/ Web Projects Manager, ECS, University of Southampton, http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
/ Webmaster, Web Science Trust, http://www.webscience.org/

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