Hidden Geospatial Knowledge on the Web

location based services

The Web has tons of information. The Web also has tons of geospatial information that computer programs don’t really know how to acquire and make use of.

The Web has helped people to be more productive. Geospatial applications such as Google Maps, Google Earth and other “mash-up” applications not only increased people’s productivity but also made their computing experience more enjoyable.

The present Web applications mainly focused on the presentation of information and the enhanced computer-user interactions. While it’s important to continue our innovations in these areas, but also it’s important to tackle new problems that can’t be solved by simply building better UI or more dynamic web pages, e.g., geosptaial semantics.

There are different types of geospatial information on the Web: maps of the Earth surface, digital photos of geographical locations, text documents that describe different world places, events, and people, etc. While information is expressed in ways that are suitable for the humans to understand, but it’s not so for the computer programs. It’s often difficult to develop software programs that can effectively search, discover and reason about the Web’s geospatial information. I called this type of information the hidden geospatial knowledge.

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Posted in General, Geospatial Applications, Geodata, Web, Geospatial Web May 20th, 2006 by harrychen | Tags: semantic web, geo, geospatial semantic web, web, GIS, semantics, hidden knowledge | 1 comment | Post to del.icio.us | Digg this story | I Reddit