GeoKnow: Making the Web an Exploratory Place for Geospatial Knowledge

ologies and technologies have strengthened their position in the areas of data and knowledge management. Standards for organizing and querying semantic information, such as RDF(S) and SPARQL are adopted by large academic communities, while corporate vendors adopt semantic technologies to organize, expose, exchange and retrieve their data as Linked Data [1]. RDF stores have become robust enough to support volumes of billions of records (RDF triples), and also offer data management and querying functionalities very similar to those of traditional relational database systems. Currently, there are three major sources of open geospatial data in the Web: Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI), open data catalogues, and crowdsourced initiatives. Crowdsourced geospatial data are emerging as a potentially valuable source of geospatial knowledge. Among various efforts we highlight OpenStreetMap, GeoNames, and Wikipedia as the most significant. Recently, GeoSPARQL [2] has emerged as a promising standard from W3C for geospatial RDF, with the aim of standardizing geospatial RDF data modelling and querying. Integrating Semantic Web with geospatial data management requires the scientific community to address two challenges: (i) the definition of proper standards and vocabularies that describe geospatial information according to RDF(S) and SPARQL protocols, that also conform to the principles of established geospatial standards, (e.g. OGC), (ii) the development of technologies for efficient storage, robust indexing, and native processing of semantically organized geospatial data.