The fourth edition of the International Conference on Geospatial Semantics
(GeoS 2011) was held in Brest, France, during May 12–13, 2011.
Geospatial semantics (GEOS) is an emerging research area in the domain of
geographic information science. It aims at exploring strategies, computational
methods, and tools to support semantic interoperability, geographic information
retrieval, and usability. Research on geospatial semantics is intrinsically multidisciplinary
and therefore GeoS traditionally brings together researchers whose
expertise will address issues from diverse fields such as cognitive science, geography,
linguistics, mathematics, philosophy, and information technology.
The fourth edition of GeoS provided a forum for the exchange of state-ofthe-
art research results in the areas of modelling and processing of geospatial
semantics. Research in geospatial semantics is critical for the development of
next-generation spatial databases and geographic information systems, as well
as specialized geospatial Web services. Within the context of the Semantic Web,
the need for semantic enablement of geospatial services is crucial, given the
ever-increasing availability of mainly unstructured geospatial data. This problem
is exacerbated by the very recent and ever-growing phenomena of crowd sourcing
and volunteered geographic information.
These proceedings contain full research papers which were selected from
among 23 submissions received in response to the Call for Papers. Each submission
was reviewed by three or four Program Committee members and 13
papers were chosen for presentation. The papers focused on formal and semantic
approaches, time and activity-based patterns, ontologies, as well as quality,
conflicts, and semantic integration. Overall, a wide range of research efforts were
presented by researchers from institutions in Italy, Mexico, France, Belgium,
Japan, UK, USA, Switzerland, Portugal, and Germany.