Geoweb

Last updated

The concept of a Geospatial Web may have first been introduced by Dr. Charles Herring in his US DoD paper, An Architecture of Cyberspace: Spatialization of the Internet, 1994, U.S. Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratory ( 40°8′58.9″N88°16′22.7″W / 40.149694°N 88.272972°W / 40.149694; -88.272972 (U.S. Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratory) ).

Contents

Dr. Herring proposed that the problem of defining the physical domain in a computer or cyber-infrastructure, providing real time and appropriate fidelity, required a cyber-spatial reference or index combining both Internet Addressing and Hierarchical Spatial Addressing.

As such, the Geoweb would be characterized by the self synchronization of network addressing, time and location. The Geoweb would allow location to be used to self organize all geospatially referenced data available through the Internet.

The interest in a Geoweb has been advanced by new technologies, concepts and products, specifically the popularization of GPS positioning with the introduction of the iPhone in 2007.

Virtual globes such as Google Earth and NASA World Wind as well as mapping websites such as Google Maps, Live Search Maps, Yahoo Maps, and OpenStreetMap have been major factors in raising awareness towards the importance of geography and location as a means to index information.

The increase in advanced web development methods such as Ajax are providing inspiration to move GIS (Geographical Information Systems) into the web.

Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) has emerged as an academic community interested in technical aspects of helping people find information about places. In order to make information accessible from geographically oriented applications, coordinate metadata must be created via some form of geocoding or geoparsing process. After obtaining geographic coordinates, they must be indexed in useful ways that allow people to interact with the non-geographic nature of the content, e.g. viewing photographs or keyword searching.

The semi-annual Geoweb Summits in New York have covered the emerging geoweb industry since 2010, connecting GIS and mobile LBS with Internet of things and augmented reality.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Geographic information system</span> System to capture, manage, and present geographic data

A geographic information system (GIS) consists of integrated computer hardware and software that store, manage, analyze, edit, output, and visualize geographic data. Much of this often happens within a spatial database; however, this is not essential to meet the definition of a GIS. In a broader sense, one may consider such a system also to include human users and support staff, procedures and workflows, the body of knowledge of relevant concepts and methods, and institutional organizations.

A geocode is a code that represents a geographic entity. It is a unique identifier of the entity, to distinguish it from others in a finite set of geographic entities. In general the geocode is a human-readable and short identifier.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Geotagging</span> Act of associating geographic coordinates to digital media

Geotagging, or GeoTagging, is the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as a geotagged photograph or video, websites, SMS messages, QR Codes or RSS feeds and is a form of geospatial metadata. This data usually consists of latitude and longitude coordinates, though they can also include altitude, bearing, distance, accuracy data, and place names, and perhaps a time stamp.

Address geocoding, or simply geocoding, is the process of taking a text-based description of a location, such as an address or the name of a place, and returning geographic coordinates, frequently latitude/longitude pair, to identify a location on the Earth's surface. Reverse geocoding, on the other hand, converts geographic coordinates to a description of a location, usually the name of a place or an addressable location. Geocoding relies on a computer representation of address points, the street / road network, together with postal and administrative boundaries.

A GIS software program is a computer program to support the use of a geographic information system, providing the ability to create, store, manage, query, analyze, and visualize geographic data, that is, data representing phenomena for which location is important. The GIS software industry encompasses a broad range of commercial and open-source products that provide some or all of these capabilities within various information technology architectures.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shapefile</span> Geospatial vector data format

The shapefile format is a geospatial vector data format for geographic information system (GIS) software. It is developed and regulated by Esri as a mostly open specification for data interoperability among Esri and other GIS software products. The shapefile format can spatially describe vector features: points, lines, and polygons, representing, for example, water wells, rivers, and lakes. Each item usually has attributes that describe it, such as name or temperature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GeaBios</span>

GeaBios is a free (non-profit) "Slovene Citizen Oriented Information Service", and the name stands for Geo Enabled And Better Internet Oriented Services.

Pennsylvania Spatial Data Access (PASDA) is Pennsylvania's official public access geospatial information clearinghouse. PASDA serves as Pennsylvania's node on the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI). PASDA is a cooperative effort of the Pennsylvania Geospatial Technologies Office of the Office of Information Technology and the Pennsylvania State University Institute of Energy and the Environment.

Oracle Spatial and Graph, formerly Oracle Spatial, is a free option component of the Oracle Database. The spatial features in Oracle Spatial and Graph aid users in managing geographic and location-data in a native type within an Oracle database, potentially supporting a wide range of applications — from automated mapping, facilities management, and geographic information systems (AM/FM/GIS), to wireless location services and location-enabled e-business. The graph features in Oracle Spatial and Graph include Oracle Network Data Model (NDM) graphs used in traditional network applications in major transportation, telcos, utilities and energy organizations and RDF semantic graphs used in social networks and social interactions and in linking disparate data sets to address requirements from the research, health sciences, finance, media and intelligence communities.

Digital Earth is the name given to a concept by former US vice president Al Gore in 1998, describing a virtual representation of the Earth that is georeferenced and connected to the world's digital knowledge archives.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Web mapping</span> Process of using the maps delivered by geographic information systems (GIS) in World Wide Web

Web mapping or an online mapping is the process of using, creating, and distributing maps on the World Wide Web, usually through the use of Web geographic information systems. A web map or an online map is both served and consumed, thus, web mapping is more than just web cartography, it is a service where consumers may choose what the map will show.

Geographic information retrieval (GIR) or geographical information retrieval systems are search tools for searching the Web, enterprise documents, and mobile local search that combine traditional text-based queries with location querying, such as a map or placenames. Like traditional information retrieval systems, GIR systems index text and information from structured and unstructured documents, and also augment those indices with geographic information. The development and engineering of GIR systems aims to build systems that can reliably answer queries that include a geographic dimension, such as "What wars were fought in Greece?" or "restaurants in Beirut". Semantic similarity and word-sense disambiguation are important components of GIR. To identify place names, GIR systems often rely on natural language processing or other metadata to associate text documents with locations. Such georeferencing, geotagging, and geoparsing tools often need databases of location names, known as gazetteers.

A geoportal is a type of web portal used to find and access geographic information and associated geographic services via the Internet. Geoportals are important for effective use of geographic information systems (GIS) and a key element of a spatial data infrastructure (SDI).

Distributed GIS refers to GI Systems that do not have all of the system components in the same physical location. This could be the processing, the database, the rendering or the user interface. It represents a special case of distributed computing, with examples of distributed systems including Internet GIS, Web GIS, and Mobile GIS. Distribution of resources provides corporate and enterprise-based models for GIS. Distributed GIS permits a shared services model, including data fusion based on Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) web services. Distributed GIS technology enables modern online mapping systems, Location-based services (LBS), web-based GIS and numerous map-enabled applications. Other applications include transportation, logistics, utilities, farm / agricultural information systems, real-time environmental information systems and the analysis of the movement of people. In terms of data, the concept has been extended to include volunteered geographical information. Distributed processing allows improvements to the performance of spatial analysis through the use of techniques such as parallel processing.

Reverse geocoding is the process of converting a location as described by geographic coordinates to a human-readable address or place name. It is the opposite of forward geocoding, hence the term reverse. Reverse geocoding permits the identification of nearby street addresses, places, and/or areal subdivisions such as neighbourhoods, county, state, or country. Combined with geocoding and routing services, reverse geocoding is a critical component of mobile location-based services and Enhanced 911 to convert a coordinate obtained by GPS to a readable street address which is easier to understand by the end user, but not necessarily with a better accuracy.

Neogeography is the use of geographical techniques and tools for personal and community activities or by a non-expert group of users. Application domains of neogeography are typically not formal or analytical.

In geographic information systems, toponym resolution is the relationship process between a toponym, i.e. the mention of a place, and an unambiguous spatial footprint of the same place.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carto (company)</span> Cloud computing platform

CARTO is a software as a service (SaaS) spatial analysis platform that provides GIS, web mapping, data visualization, spatial analytics, and spatial data science features. The company is positioned as a Location Intelligence platform due to its tools for geospatial data analysis and visualization that do not require advanced GIS or development experience. As a cloud-native platform, CARTO runs natively on cloud data warehouse platforms overcoming any previous limits on data scale for spatial workloads.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Discrete global grid</span> Partition of Earths surface into subdivided cells

A discrete global grid (DGG) is a mosaic that covers the entire Earth's surface. Mathematically it is a space partitioning: it consists of a set of non-empty regions that form a partition of the Earth's surface. In a usual grid-modeling strategy, to simplify position calculations, each region is represented by a point, abstracting the grid as a set of region-points. Each region or region-point in the grid is called a cell.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Web GIS</span> Technologies employing the World Wide Web to manage spatial data

Web GIS, or Web Geographic Information Systems, are GIS that employ the World Wide Web to facilitate the storage, visualization, analysis, and distribution of spatial information over the Internet. The World Wide Web, or the Web, is an information system that uses the internet to host, share, and distribute documents, images, and other data. Web GIS involves using the World Wide Web to facilitate GIS tasks traditionally done on a desktop computer, as well as enabling the sharing of maps and spatial data. While Web GIS and Internet GIS are sometimes used interchangeably, they are different concepts. Web GIS is a subset of Internet GIS, which is itself a subset of distributed GIS, which itself is a subset of broader Geographic information system. The most common application of Web GIS is Web mapping, so much so that the two terms are often used interchangeably in much the same way as Digital mapping and GIS. However, Web GIS and web mapping are distinct concepts, with web mapping not necessarily requiring a Web GIS.