Geospatial — ISO 19135 register and cross-vocabulary equivalences

Geospatial terminology lives across dozens of standards bodies: ISO/TC 211 (geographic information), the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and numerous national mapping agencies. Each maintains their own vocabulary; concepts overlap and diverge.

Glossarist powers the multi-register concept graph that ties them together.

The problem

Geospatial terminology work has unique pain points:

Many overlapping vocabularies — A concept like feature exists in ISO 19107 (spatial schema), OGC Simple Features, and INSPIRE; the designations and definitions overlap but aren’t identical.
Cross-vocabulary equivalences — Adopters need to know “OGC’s feature is exact_match to ISO 19107’s feature and close_match to INSPIRE’s spatial object”.
Register lifecycle — ISO 19135 defines a register lifecycle (proposed → accepted → withdrawn) with governance semantics. Each concept’s lifecycle must be auditable.
Multilingual coverage — UN languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish) plus regional languages.

The Glossarist solution

Cross-vocabulary equivalence via `exact_match` and friends

Glossarist’s relationship taxonomy implements SKOS mapping properties directly:

# datasets/iso-19107/concepts/feature.yaml
related:
  - type: exact_match
    ref: { source: urn:ogc:def:spec, id: "feature" }
  - type: close_match
    ref: { source: urn:eu:inspire, id: "spatial-object" }
  - type: broad_match
    ref: { source: urn:iso:19109, id: "gf-featuretype" }

These map to SKOS:

exact_match → skos:exactMatch
close_match → skos:closeMatch
broad_match → skos:broadMatch
narrow_match → skos:narrowMatch
related_match → skos:relatedMatch

See Relationships — SKOS Alignment for the full table.

ISO 19135 register lifecycle

ManagedConcept.status carries the ISO 19135 lifecycle states:

termid: "iso-19107:feature"
status: valid              # was 'accepted' in ISO 19135
dates:
  - type: accepted
    date: "2003-12-01"
    source: "ISO 19107:2003"
  - type: last-reviewed
    date: "2019-12-01"
    source: "ISO 19107:2019"

The dates field captures governance events history — see Concepts — ManagedConcept.

Multilingual designations via localizations

UN-language coverage is structural, not bolted on:

termid: "iso-19107:feature"
status: valid

localizations:
  eng:
    language: eng
    terms:
      - type: expression
        designation: feature
        normative_status: preferred
    definition:
      - type: intensional
        content: "Abstraction of real world phenomena."
  ara:
    language: ara
    terms:
      - type: expression
        designation: عنصر
        normative_status: preferred
  rus:
    language: rus
    terms:
      - type: expression
        designation: объект
        normative_status: preferred
  zho:
    language: zho
    terms:
      - type: expression
        designation: 要素
        normative_status: preferred
  fra:
    language: fra
    terms:
      - type: expression
        designation: entité géographique
        normative_status: preferred
  spa:
    language: spa
    terms:
      - type: expression
        designation: objeto geográfico
        normative_status: preferred

Generic hyperedges for concept-system types

ISO 19107 organizes feature under a genus/species rake by spatial dimension:

# relations/iso-19107-feature/by-spatial-dimension.yaml
$id: iso-19107-feature/by-spatial-dimension
type: generic_relation
comprehensive: { source: ISO, id: "19107:feature" }
members:
  - ref: { source: ISO, id: "19107:point-feature" }
    delimitingCharacteristic: { eng: has zero spatial extent }
  - ref: { source: ISO, id: "19107:curve-feature" }
    delimitingCharacteristic: { eng: has one spatial extent dimension }
  - ref: { source: ISO, id: "19107:surface-feature" }
    delimitingCharacteristic: { eng: has two spatial extent dimensions }
  - ref: { source: ISO, id: "19107:solid-feature" }
    delimitingCharacteristic: { eng: has three spatial extent dimensions }
completeness: complete
criterion: { eng: by spatial dimension }

This is a monodimensional monohierarchical generic concept system in the ISO 704 §5.6.3 typology — see Concept System Types.

Results

Metric	Before Glossarist	With Glossarist
Cross-vocabulary equivalence lookup	Manual search across OGC/ISO/INSPIRE sites	One click in concept-browser; SPARQL queryable
Register lifecycle auditability	Per-CVS-log archaeology	`dates[]` array on every concept; ISO 19135 states enforced
UN language coverage	Maintained ad-hoc per project	All 6 UN languages structurally required by collection schema
SKOS/RDF publication	Hand-crafted per release	Auto-generated from same YAML that produces the HTML register
Time to add a new national-language term	Weeks (workflow coordination)	Minutes (one PR with a new localizations entry)

Try it

The concept-browser demo includes a 4-vocabulary cross-register graph (ISO 19107 + OGC + INSPIRE + FAO). Search for “feature” to see the equivalence cluster.