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Welcome to the geographical-entity-ontology (GEO) wiki!

Rationale and description

The term 'United States' refers to either (1) the sovereign nation state or (2) the geographical region claimed and governed by the nation state. For example, when we say "The United States declared war on Germany in 1941", we are talking about (1). However, when we say "The Colorado River is located in the United States", we are talking about (2). Further, note that the United States has been the same nation since at least the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1788. However, its territory has progressively expanded since that time. There do not exist new instances of the United States as a nation each time it adds territory. Numerous nations undergo such changes while still being the same nation. Thus, equating a nation with its territory is a category mistake.

Therefore, GEO will represent both geopolitical organizations and their subdivisions as well as the geographical regions over which they have jurisdiction. For example, there will be a different IRI for Florida (the U.S. state) and its territory or geographical region (region of Florida).

The permanent URL (PURL) to the most recent release of GEO is http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/geo.owl

The PURL to the development version of GEO is http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/geo/dev/geo.owl

Note that geo.owl (both development and production versions) does not contain any individuals. The individuals are now modularized into different OWL files, each with its own PURL.

The issue tracker for GEO is at https://github.com/ufbmi/geographical-entity-ontology/issues

Update 2016-03-26

1. New modular architecture: individuals no longer in geo.owl. Now modularized into multiple files:

• basic-geography.owl
• nation-geography.owl
• nation-instances.owl
• nation-and-dependency-instances.owl
• nation-and-dependency-geography.owl
• us-basic-geography.owl
• us-integral-geography.owl
• us-dependency-geography.owl

1. Added US county files, including land and water area measurements, and centroid longitude and latitude.