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ClassLocation
The dcterms:Location class is imported directly into darwin-sw (DSW).
By design, it is intended that resources described by darwin-sw have properties that are terms in the DwC standard. It seems clear that the terms listed under the dcterms:Location class in the DwC standard1 are all appropriate for use as properties of resources typed as Locations in darwin-sw.
However, many of the DwC terms are not in widespread use. Because of the widespread use of GPS technology, the terms geo:lat and geo:long (namespace http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos# abbreviated geo:)2 have recently come into common use. (The geo: terms assume the geodetic datum used by gps: WGS84.) Applications outside of the biodiversity informatics community are more likely to "understand" these terms than the corresponding DwC terms. In recognition of this there is currently (April 2011) a proposal to add these terms to the DwC standard. Thus it seems appropriate that these terms be used to describe resources in the Location class.
It has also been suggested that a recently proposed "geo:" URI scheme4 would be appropriate for a fully semantic RDF version of Darwin Core5 6. Since these URIs are not HTTP URIs, their usefulness would be dependent on how widespread their acceptance becomes and how commonly consuming applications would know how to interpret them.
1 http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm
2 http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/
3 http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/issues/detail?id=82
4 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5870
5 http://lists.tdwg.org/pipermail/tdwg-content/2010-October/001609.html
6 http://lists.tdwg.org/pipermail/tdwg-content/2010-November/002045.html
- dwc:decimalLatitude can use geo:lat instead if geodetic reference datum is WGS84
- dwc:decimalLongitude Can use geo:long instead if if geodetic reference datum is WGS84
- dwc:minimumElevationInMeters and maximumElevationInMeters Can both be replaced by a single value for geo:alt
- dwc:geodeticDatum Note: not necessary with geo: terms
- dwc:coordinateUncertaintyInMeters Suitable term for indicating uncertainty in latitude and longitude
- dwc:locationRemarks text literal
- dwc:georeferenceRemarks text literal
- dwc:georeferencedBy text literal form, use georefBy for object property
- dwc:countryCode ISO 3166-1-alpha-2 country codes (text literal)
- dwc:stateProvince unabbreviated text literal
- dwc:county unabbreviated text literal
- dwc:locality text literal
- dsw:georefBy range FOAF entities (e.g. a foaf:Person)
- dsw:locates range dwc:Event