The availability of geographic and geo-spatial information and services, especially
on the openWeb, has become abundant in the last several yearswith the proliferation
of online maps, geo-coding services, geospatial Web services and geospatially enabled
applications. Concurrently, the need for geo-spatial reasoning has significantly
increased in many everyday applications ranging from personal digital assistants, to
Web search applications and local aware mobile services, to specialized systems in
critical applications such as emergency response, medical triaging, and intelligence
analysis to name a few. In response to the required “intelligent” information
processing capabilities, the field of Geospatial Semantics has emerged as an exciting
new discipline in the recent years. Broadly speaking geospatial semantics can
be defined as the area that focuses on the semantics aspect in geographic and
geo-spatial information processing i.e., where we can provide “meaning” to and
intelligence in such information systems. This new area brings together researchers
from many different disciplines such as geographic and geo-spatial information
science, artificial intelligence – in particular the Semantic Web, and information
systems. Alternate descriptions of what geospatial semantics is about can be stated
as being the sub-area of geographic or geospatial information systems that deals
with knowledge driven or intelligent processing techniques, or the particular domain
application of semantics technologies that deal with the geographic and geospatial
domain.Work in this area was initiated just a few years ago by visionary researchers
who foresaw the need for expanding erstwhile individual disciplines such as GIS or
the Semantic Web. Despite being a nascent field by age, we have seen a prolific
amount of activity in all arenas, be it basic research, technical product development,
community efforts such as developing standards, or the realization of real-world
applications powered by such technologies.