Toward the semantic geospatial web

TLDR

The growth of the Web has revealed that existing methods for locating and using information are often inadequate, while the Semantic Web promises improved retrieval by incorporating data semantics into the search process. The authors propose a new framework that reorganizes the Web as an information resource, with special attention to geospatial meaning, by explicitly representing semantics across people, interfaces, search systems, and information resources to enable more precise data retrieval. They develop multiple spatial and terminological ontologies with formal semantics, make these semantics machine‑readable and human‑understandable, and process geospatial queries against the ontologies, evaluating results by matching the semantics of the user’s information need with available resource semantics. Explicitly representing semantics in the retrieval process allows users to retrieve data more precisely based on the semantics associated with those data.

Abstract

With the growth of the World Wide Web has come the insight that currently available methods for finding and using information on the web are often insufficient. In order to move the Web from a data repository to an information resource, a totally new way of organizing information is needed. The advent of the Semantic Web promises better retrieval methods by incorporating the data's semantics and exploiting the semantics during the search process. Such a development needs special attention from the geospatial perspective so that the particularities of geospatial meaning are captured appropriately. The creation the Semantic Geospatial Web needs the development multiple spatial and terminological ontologies, each with a formal semantics; the representation of those semantics such that they are available both to machines for processing and to people for understanding; and the processing of geospatial queries against these ontologies and the evaluation of the retrieval results based on the match between the semantics of the expressed information need and the available semantics of the information resources and search systems. This will lead to a new framework for geospatial information retrieval based on the semantics of spatial and terminological ontologies. By explicitly representing the role of semantics in different components of the information retrieval process (people, interfaces, search systems, and information resources), the Semantic Geospatial Web will enable users to retrieve more precisely the data they need, based on the semantics associated with these data.