[Dbpedia-discussion] Semantic GIS site based on dbpedia, freebase, openstreetmaps, etc.

[Paul H. <pa...@on...>]

Hello,

   We just launched a new site at

http://ny-pictures.com/nyc/photo/

    which is based on data from dbpedia and freebase and uses 
openstreetmaps for mapping.

    Behind it all is a 'semantic GIS' engine that combines the ability 
to represent traditional GIS with the ability to make assertions such as 
"The Empire State Building is in Manhattan."  A particularly remarkable 
feature is that very few of the images are geotagged:  we're able to 
establish the locations of the photographs based on text and other 
available evidence.

    We've currently got an internal RDF vocabulary that does a good job 
of making assertions like

"Picture A is a picture of topic B"
"Image C is an instance of Picture A"
"Image C is 473 pixels high"
"Image C is available at <http://...>"

    We're thinking a lot about how we're going to expose these 
assertions to the general public:  we used SIOC for car pictures,  but 
it doesn't seem to be all that useful for the major use case I'm 
thinking of:  providing end users with the ability to query an endpoint 
for creative commons images about topic X and get back a list of images 
[in different sizes] with sufficient metadata to use usefully.

    Any suggestions or ideas?