GeoSPARQL: Enabling a Geospatial Semantic Web

As the amount of Linked Open Data on the web increases, so does the amount of data with an inherent spatial context. Without spatial reasoning, however, the value of this spatial context is limited. Over the past decade there have been several vocabularies and query languages that attempt to exploit this knowledge and enable spatial reasoning. These attempts provide varying levels of support for fundamental geospatial concepts. In this paper we look at the overall state of geospatial data in the Semantic Web, with a focus on the upcoming OGC standard GeoSPARQL. GeoSPARQL attempts to unify data access for the geospatial Semantic Web. We describe the motivation for GeoSPARQL, the current state of the art in industry and research, an example use case, and the implementation of GeoSPARQL in the Parliament triple store.