The Geospatial Web

Dumitru Roman • Eva Klien

The ability to represent geospatial semantics is of great importance when building geospatial applications for the Web. The Semantic Web Service (SWS) technology provides solutions for intelligent service annotation, discovery, composition and invocation in distributed environments. Deploying this technology into geospatial Web applications has the potential to enhance discovery, retrieval and integration of geographic information, as well as its reuse in various contexts. This chapter gives an overview of the SWING research framework, which is aimed at investigating the applicability of semantic technologies in the area of geospatial services. The goal is to provide a semantic framework that facilitates the employment of geospatial services to solve a specific task in geospatial decision making. In this chapter, we emphasize the motivation and the challenges for such a framework, point out the main components and highlight its potential impact.