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Geospatial Semantic Web

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Encyclopedia of GIS

Synonyms

Semantic web; Spatial semantic web; Ontologies

Definition

The Geospatial Semantic web addresses the geographic and spatial components of the Semantic Web, which is a project to create the infrastructure necessary for information sharing on the World Wide Web. The sharing should be based on the meaning of the documents. Since the interpretation of meaning is being done by computers another crucial issue is that whatever way this meaning is expressed it has to be machine‐readable. Egenhofer highlights the need for a simple canonical form to pose geospatial data queries and methods to evaluate the semantics of the geospatial data sources to fit them to geospatial queries.

Historical Background

In his vision paper about the Semantic Web, Tim Berners-Lee (2001) gives the following example: “at the doctor's office, Lucy instructed her Semantic Web agent through her handheld Web browser. The agent promptly retrieved information about Mom's prescribed treatment from the doctor's...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Berners-Lee, T., Hendler, J., Lassila, O.: The Semantic Web: A New Form of Web Content That Is Meaningful To Computers Will Unleash A Revolution Of New Possibilities. The Scientific American. 284(5), 34–43 (2001)

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  2. Egenhofer, M.J.: Toward the Semantic Geospatial Web. Tthe Tenth ACM International Symposium on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, McLean, Virginia, pp. 1–4 (2002)

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  3. Fonseca, F.: From Geo-Pragmatics to Derivation Ontologies: New Directions for the GeoSpatial Semantic Web. Transactions in GIS. 11(3), 313–316 (2007)

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  4. Fonseca, F., Egenhofer, M., Agouris, P., Câmara, G.: Using Ontologies for Integrated Geographic Information Systems. Transactions in GIS. 6(3), 231–257 (2002)

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  5. Goodchild, M.: Geographical Data Modeling. Computers and Geosciences. 18(4), 401–408 (1992)

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  6. Smith, B., Mark, D.: Ontology and Geographic Kinds. International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling, Vancouver, BC, Canada, pp. 308–320 (1998)

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  7. The Open Geospatial Consortium White Papers at www.opengeospatial.org/pressroom/papers

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Information Sciences and Technology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    Frederico Fonseca

Authors
  1. Frederico Fonseca
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, USA

    Shashi Shekhar (McKnight Distinguished University Professor) (McKnight Distinguished University Professor)

  2. Management Science and Information Systems Department, Rutgers Business School Newark and New Brunswick Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, Newark, NJ, 07102, USA

    Hui Xiong (Assistant Professor) (Assistant Professor)

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© 2008 Springer-Verlag

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Fonseca, F. (2008). Geospatial Semantic Web. In: Shekhar, S., Xiong, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of GIS. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35973-1_513

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