Rules For Geospatial Semantic Web Applications

The use of geospatial data is ubiquitous in many real-world applications. For example, geospatial data is useful for planning bus routes for a city, for finding suitable helicopter landing areas for a military operation, and for analyzing the nuclear weapon production capability of a hostile country. In a typical geospatial application, the semantics of data (e.g., vector data, sensor data, and satellite images) and the procedures for processing the data (e.g., functions for coordinate transformation and image processing) are usually tightly coupled within the application implementations. This kind of “hard-wired” approach often hinders the flexibility and portability of the applications. With the emergence of semantic web languages (i.e., RDF/RDFS and OWL), we believe that future geospatial application will be able to exploit ontologies for geospatial knowledge sharing and computation.