GeoKnow: Leveraging Geospatial Data in the Web of Data

Producing and updating geospatial data is expensive and resource intensive. Hence, it becomes crucial to be able to integrate, repurpose and extract added value from geospatial data to support decision making and management of local, national and global resources. Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) and the standardisation efforts from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) serve this goal, enabling geospatial data sharing, integration and reuse among Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Geospatial data are now, more than ever, truly syntactically interoperable. However, they remain largely isolated in the GIS realm and thus absent from the Web of Data. Linked data technologies enabling semantic interoperability, interlinking, querying, reasoning, aggregation, fusion, and visualisation of geospatial data are only slowly emerging. The vision of GeoKnow is to leverage geospatial data as first-class citizens in the Web of Data, in proportion to their significance for the data economy.