The more observant of you may have noticed some signifier of the FOAF linkage on my front page (returned after a hiatus). That’s right, you know who I am now!
That being said, everything up to now (and my quietness) has a fairly long backstory.
It started back in November of last year, when an attempt to renew pipian.com went horribly wrong (Thanks RegisterFly!) $130 and nearly two months later, I finally got it back and, by that time, had started on a new project.
This project is still somewhat secret as it’s incomplete at this time, but it’s progressing well (and some of you already know of it) and will hopefully will be marketable by the summer (crossing my fingers of course).
In the process of working on this and getting back into the groove at school (and in all the hecticness of setting up and being Chief of Operations at Genericon XX) I managed to finally (and briefly) meet Jim Hendler, who is currently in the process of moving to take a constellation chair at RPI this semester. This got me thinking.
One of the items that my ’secret’ project needs is something of a stable geospatial framework of coordinates, cities, and hierarchies, to enable intuitive and ’smart’ discovery of as many cities as possible, and as needed. Thus, I came up with the concept of the Semantic Web Locationary, utilizing several well-known semantic ontologies and several free/libre data sources to accurately describe many geopolitical constructs (mainly hierarchies of city->province->country->continent->Earth styles).
I figured this would both help to get my feet wet in a seriously usable semantic web context (The Geonames.org ontology is not terribly human-friendly, even if machine-friendly and more detailed than the Locationary) as well as offering a framework for my program to rest on as well as offer a static reference for other semantic applications (foaf:basedNear anyone?).
At any rate, it’s somewhat stable now, in so far as all the MAIN parts are implemented (if a bit in semantic flux at the moment), so I can move closer back to the project by overlaying one more data store over the existing Locationary (Arash Partow’s Global Airport Database, given the fact that DAML no longer has their airport script online, DAFIF is no longer available, and my project needs airport locations) and probably making that publically available as well…
More information about what I’m REALLY planning with this semantic data when the project gets closer to completion. 
