Dear Geospatial Web: WHERE are the Semantics?
Geospatial Semantic Web sounds great. You can organize a conference with this title, and everyone will think your a genious, or at least you’re a mad scientist.
Locations are increasing importance everywhere in the web. And it’s easily understandable, most of information has a geographic dimension. In the last two years we’ve added this dimension to our popular Web 2.0. By 01/01/2008, Wikipedia had 7,5 million articles and 800,000 of them were geotagged using geonames. 2,2 million photos were geotagged in Flickr, Just in December 2007!. And the list of social webs that allows resources geotagging, or collaborative mapping, grows every day, Youtube, Picasa, Panoramio, Wikimapia, OpenStreetMap etc.
As we can see in the image from google trends, although geospatial enabled applications (Panoramio, Wikimapia) are growing in popularity quite fast, more theorical related topics haven’t taken off already (semantic web, geospatial, geo web).
It’s amazing how hundreds of thousands of people are collaborating to these geo - apps for free, but for some of us, a geographically enabled Web 2.0 is not enough. We want more (just a bit more?).
