3. Geospatial Semantic Web

Inspired by Tim Berners-Lee (Berners-Lee 1998), inventor of the Web, a growing number of individuals and groups from academia and industry have been evolving the Web into another level—the Semantic Web. By representing not only words, but their definitions and contexts, the Semantic Web provides a common interoperable framework in which information is given a well-defined meaning such that data and applications can be used by machines (reasoning) for more effective discovery, automation, integration and reuse across various application, enterprise and community boundaries. Compared to the conventional Web, the Semantic Web excels in two aspects (W3C 2001): (1) common formats for data interchange (the original Web only had interchange of documents) and (2) a language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. With such advancements, reasoning engines and Web-crawling agents can go one step further—and inductively respond to questions such as “which airfields within 500 miles of Kandahar support C5A aircraft?” rather than simply returning Web pages that contain the text “airfield” and “Kandahar”, which most engines do today.