SeBGIS 2006 PC Co-chairs’ Message

Abstract

Many societal applications, for example in domains such as health care, land use, disaster management, and environmental monitoring, increasingly rely on geographical information for their decision making. With the emergence of the World WideWeb this information is typically located in multiple, distributed, diverse, and autonomously-maintained systems. Therefore, strategic decision making in these societal applications relies on the ability to enrich the semantics associated to geographical information in order to support a wide variety of tasks including data integration, interoperability, knowledge reuse, knowledge acquisition, knowledge management, spatial reasoning, and many others. While all research realized in the area of Semantic Web provides a foundation for annotating information resources with machine-readable meaning, much work must still be done for eliciting semantics of geographical information. Spatial information has embraced many recent technological developments in which semantics plays a crucial role. Data warehouses and OLAP systems constitute a fundamental component of todays diverse locations.

An erratum to this chapter can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/11915072_109.