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Geospatial Semantic Web

The term geospatial semantic web has been coined to describe the convergence of three distinct concepts in computing and geographic information science. The first is a geospatial web composed of geospatial information Web services. The second is geospatial semantics—the formal and computable definition of the meanings of geospatial terms. The third concept is the semantic web—representing the growth of the World Wide Web from a web of human-accessible content into a web of data traversed by machine agents.

Geospatial Web

Almost as soon as the World Wide Web came into being, so too did the idea that content on the Web might have a counterpart in the real world with a corresponding geospatial position, referred to as the spatialization of the Web. Position coordinates alone provided little benefit, though, without capabilities for making maps and forming location-relevant hyperlinks. In the late 1990s, standards organizations such as the Open Geospatial Consortium and vendors such as ESRI and MapQuest began to define, build, and offer geospatial services. Services allowed Web sites to provide dynamically rendered maps of useful information and geospatially relevant links, such as hotels close to a user location, that can be used without much specialized expertise. The usefulness and volume of geospatial data and functionality on the Web has since grown with the deployment of extensive geospatial Web services that allow such resources to be maintained locally and yet accessed globally over the Internet. Even with the development of geospatial catalogs and registries, however, the interconnectedness and hence the value of the resulting “GeoWeb” has been constrained by the difficulty of meaningfully relating data elements from disparate localities and knowledge communities to one another and to Web users at large. The “pushpin on a road map” paradigm has proved a difficult one to move past in terms of large-scale accessibility to geospatial knowledge.

Geospatial Semantics

The challenge of making meaningful connections between disparate pieces of information is being addressed by the growing field of formal and machine semantics, using formally defined, logically tractable knowledge representations such as OWL (Ontology Web Language) and explicit expressions of connected data such as RDF (Resource Description Framework). In the geospatial domain, developments such as RCC8 (Regional Connection Calculus) have provided formal definitions of the ways in which the relations between real-world features can be represented. The goal of geospatial semantics has been to provide standards, representations, and tools that allow localized geographic understanding to be communicated universally.

Semantic Web

The remaining challenge to the emergence of the geospatial semantic Web has been to apply geospatial semantic tools and technologies on a Web scale. The means to address this challenge is just beginning to come from geospatial extensions to technologies supporting the development of the semantic Web, including geospatially enabled query languages, spatial inference engines, and geospatial ontologies. Their goal is a Web of geospatial knowledge in which computers create and leverage as well as host connections both between geospatial data elements and with the parts of the physical world they represent.

  • geospatial semantic web
JoshuaLieberman
http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412939591.n493
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