Core Entity

Location

Status: Standard

Definition: An identifiable geographic place.
Guidance: ISO 19112 defines a location as "an identifiable geographic place" With this in mind, "Eiffel Tower", "Madrid" and "California" are all locations and this is a common way of representing locations in public sector data, i.e. simply by using a recognised name. Such identifiers are common although they can be highly ambiguous as many places share the same or similar names.

Locations can be described in three principal ways: by using a place name, a geometry or an address. The specific context will determine which method of describing a location is most appropriate.

In addition to a simple (string) label or name for a Location, this vocabulary defines a property that allows a Location to be defined by a URI, such as a URI used in the Named Authority Lists of the EU Publications Office (NALs) or a GeoNames URI.

The Core Vocabularies make a minimum number of assumptions about what data will be encoded. A single address may be defined in different ways, a geometry may be defined using different coordinate reference systems and a single place may have no recognised name or multiple names. However, it is clearly nonsense to define a location without any properties or to provide multiple instances of the same property with conflicting values.
Unique identifier: http://api.gov.au/definition/ce/ce52
API url: https://api.gov.au/definitions/api/definition/ce/ce52
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