Geospatial Meaning

Spatial information, or knowledge, has unique and special problems and characteristics. Since the 90s, many people consider Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as a set of technologies that try to solve spatial problems. But the academic theory behind the development, use, and application of GIS is widely named Geographic Information Science or GIScience.

That is, a Science of Geographic or Spatial Information.In 2006, the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science, formed by some tens of USA Universities published the Geographic Information Scicence & Technology Body of Knowledge, which represents an effort to compile an inventory of the skills, concepts and knowledge related to Geographic Information Science and Technology.

It is worth a look, and it is quite cheap, just 25$. The next release or version is planned for 2010. It will necessary have to update all knowledge about Geospatial Data, Standards and Metadata that have emerged in the last years. Also the new challenges arised from Location Based Services and Mobile Geoweb have to be taken into account.

If you are still amazed for the huge amount of location-aware applications that have given rise to the GeoWeb, Prepare yourself for the next trend!!

I read the book The Geospatial Web, How Geobrowsers, Social Software and the Web 2.0 are Shaping the Network Society just 10 months ago. And it is almost obsolete! Many times research proposals are archived in deep drawers, or must wait technology, money or society to become real.But mainly Google Maps, and also Yahoo Maps and Live Search Maps have contributed to a location revolution.

People understand fast location based services, because location is inherent to our existence. For most of us, it is easy to understand the new map-navigation paradigms.

There is just a technology that got in our souls faster than internet. A bad quality and expensive technology: the mobile phones. Now everything points to a convergence between these two succesful worlds. Mobile GeoWeb is arriving and will success probably in less than 12 months. Mobile GeoWeb will allow the user to receive, and add information while on the move. Many people that nowadays can’t access to internet services will find easyer to ask the phone for a restaurant, a beautiful sight or a bank in their neighbourhood.

Some clues are here: New GPS enabled phones, Mapping applications adapted to mobile devices, and increasing of Location based services in mobile frameworks.

GPS enabled phones

Although the list of GPS enabled phones is increasing, the main actors are the following:

Phones working over Windows Mobile OS, as HTC and Blacberry ones.

Phones over Simbian. The biggest mobile vendor, Nokia, offers a couple of devices with the N95 heading the list.

The last apple’s gadget, the iPhone 3G.

Mobile mapping applications

Google maps mobile.

Nokia maps 2.0

PSP Go! Explorer

iPhone maps

And more Location based software

Nokia Exif Location Tagger, Nokia walk and others.

Windows Mobile GPS tracking and navigation software

Webs adapted for mobile devices and Location Based Services.

Aircratf and airport mobile information.

And, What to do?

Let’s get geospatial semantic web mobile.

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?).

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