Since 2021, the geometries of the Marine
Regions gazetteer are available as Well-Known Text (Loneville et al.,
(2021)), coming directly from the data base and offered as Open
Linked Data and Linked
Data Event Streams. Previously, they were just WMS links, in many
cases coming from the Marine Regions OGC Web Services hosted at the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ)
geoserver. Therefore, the functions of mregions did not
use the ?MRGID in an effort to unify the geometries that
were in geoserver with the gazetteer entries. However all those
geometries hosted by third parties were left out.
This method is not needed anymore since we harvest the geometries from the WMS links and stored in the Gazetteer. mregions2 makes a very clear distinction between the Gazetteer database and the Data Products created by Marine Regions.
We decided to create a new package to not break
compatibility. We will continue to maintain
mregions::mregions but we won’t add new developments.
What’s new in mregions2?
During 2021, new web services were developed to access the Marine Regions Gazetteer. In essence, two major changes happened:
- The database can be accessed now through Open Linked Data standards: JSON-LD and Turtle.
- The geometry associated to each gazetteer record is now available through RESTful services.
More information in:
Lonneville B. et al. (2021) Publishing the Marine Regions Gazetteer as a Linked Data Event Stream. S4BioDiv 2021. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2969/paper8-s4biodiv.pdf
The package uses these two new functionalities to serve geometries in
R as sf::sf objects, and allows to retrieve the Gazetteer
database as rdflib::rdf objects. See the Marine
Regions Gazetteer as RDF article for further information.