14
Geospatial Semantic Web
14.1 Introduction
The large volume of geospatial data available on the Web opens up unprecedented
opportunities for data access and data interchange, facilitating the design of new
geospatial applications and claiming for the redesign of traditional ones. However,
to interoperate, geospatial applications must be able to locate and access the data
sources, and agree both on the syntax and on the semantics of the data that flow
between them. Achieving interoperability is more difficult in this case simply
because geospatial data are much more complex than conventional data, with respect
to both syntax and semantics.
A convenient way to provide universal access (over the Web) to geospatial data
sources is to implement geospatial Web services that encapsulate the data sources,
because this strategy obviates the need for traditional means of data distribution.
Furthermore, as pointed out in Lieberman et al. (2005), geospatial Web services
would benefit from the adoption of Semantic Web technologies, thereby becoming
understandable to the applications. This evolution includes the development and
encoding of formal geospatial ontologies, which would leverage existing standards.
The result is called the Geospatial Semantic Web.
A major enabling technology of the Geospatial Semantic Web is the service-
oriented architecture, which in turn depends on interoperability standards related to
all aspects of geospatial service operations. The geospatial community has already
developed a set of specifications through standard-setting bodies, including the ISO
Technical Committee 211 (TC 211), the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), the
European Community initiative Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe
(INSPIRE), and the U.S. Federal Geospatial Data Committee (FGDC).
