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Geospatial Semantic Web

  • Reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of GIS

  • 106 Accesses

Synonyms

Ontologies; Semantic web; Spatial semantic web

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 et al. (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...

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References

  • Berners-Lee T, Hendler J, Lassila O (2001) The semantic web: a new form of web content that is meaningful to computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities. Sci Am 284(5):34–43

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Recommended Reading

  • Egenhofer MJ (2002) Toward the semantic geospatial web. In: The tenth ACM international symposium on advances in geographic information systems, McLean, pp 1–4

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  • Fonseca F (2007) From geo-pragmatics to derivation ontologies: new directions for the geospatial semantic web. Trans GIS 11(3):313–316

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  • Fonseca F, Egenhofer M, Agouris P, Câmara G (2002) Using ontologies for integrated geographic information systems. Trans GIS 6(3):231–257

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Goodchild M (1992) Geographical data modeling. Comput Geosci 18(4):401–408

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  • Smith B, Mark D (1998) Ontology and geographic kinds. In: International symposium on spatial data handling, Vancouver, BC, pp 308–320

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  • 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, 307E IST Building, 16802-6823, University Park, PA, USA

    Frederico Fonseca

Authors
  1. Frederico Fonseca
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Frederico Fonseca .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

    Shashi Shekhar

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

    Hui Xiong

  3. Department of Management Sciences, Tippie College of Business, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA

    Xun Zhou

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© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG

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Fonseca, F. (2017). Geospatial Semantic Web. In: Shekhar, S., Xiong, H., Zhou, X. (eds) Encyclopedia of GIS. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17885-1_513

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