The Geospatial Web

Gabriella Castelli • Alberto Rosi • Marco Mamei • Franco Zambonelli

Pervasive computing technologies, together with the increasing participation of the Web community in feeding geo-located information within tools such as Google Earth, will soon make available a huge amount of real-time information about the physical world and its processes. This opens up the possibility of exploiting all such information for the ubiquitous provisioning of context-aware services for “browsing the world” around us. However, for this to occur, proper general-purpose data models and software infrastructures must be developed. In this chapter, we propose a simple, yet effective model for the representation of heterogeneous contextual information and the design and implementation of a general user-centric infrastructure for ubiquitous browsing of the world. The presentations of some exemplar services we have implemented over it and have made available to users via Google Earth interfacing complete the chapter.