O'Reilly Network -- The Geospatial Web: A Call to Action: "What We Still Need to Build for an Insanely Cool Open Geospatial Web
by Mike Liebhold, contributor to O'Reilly's upcoming Mapping Hacks
05/10/2005
Editor's note: In this article, Mike Liebhold writes about what we need to do to tap the as yet unharvested business opportunities in a geospatial web. This is just the type of topic we'll be exploring at the O'Reilly conference Where 2.0, coming to San Francisco in late June. Join us to learn how vendors, application developers, and consumer web companies are using GPS, RFID, WLAN, cellular networks, and networked sensors in new ways to solve old business problems.

Beyond a growing commercial interest in mobile GIS and location services, there's deep geek fascination with web mapping and location hacking. After several years of early experiments by a first generation of geohackers, locative media artists, and psychogeographers, a second, larger wave of hackers are demonstrating some amazing tricks with Google Maps, Flickr, and del.icio.us. Meanwhile, a growing international cadre of open source digital geographers and frontier semantic hackers have been building first-generation working versions of powerful new open source web mapping service tools based on open standards like WMS (web map services) and WFS (web feature services), all built on GML (geographic markup language) and XML. You can see for yourself: hundreds of new geospatial web-related links from perhaps thousands of geeks and users are aggregated daily at del.icio.us/inbox/starhill_blend.
Out of this teeming ecosystem, we can see the beginning shapes of a true geospatial web, inhabited by spatially tagged hypermedia as well as digital map geodata. Google Maps is just one more layer among all the invisible"