Database Reference
In-Depth Information
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A Gentle Beginning
1.1 WHAT THIS TOPIC IS ABOUT AND WHO IT IS FOR
The majority of people have not heard of terms such as the Semantic Web, Linked
Data, and Geographic Information (GI); these terms are at the very most known of
only vaguely. GI is the “old boy,” having been around as a term for at least thirty
and perhaps forty years, but has existed within a relatively small community of
experts, a growing community but nonetheless small compared to the total size of
the “information community” in general. As its name implies, it refers to any infor-
mation that has a geographic component. The terms
Semantic Web
and
Linked Data
are the “new kids on the block.” The Semantic Web is an extension of the Web, which
enables people and machines to understand the meaning of the data on the Web more
easily. The idea of the Semantic Web was conceived in the late 1990s and as a whole
has remained largely in the academic world since that time. Linked Data is a com-
ponent of the Semantic Web and concerns the manner in which data is structured,
interrelated, and published on the Web; as a named entity, it has only been around
since the mid-2000s.
The use of GI has been well established within the information technology (IT)
community for a long time and is becoming increasingly important as a means to
enable geographic analysis and as an aid to integrate data. Linked Data has been
growing rapidly since 2007, resulting in the emergence of the Linked Data Web,
a part of the broader World Wide Web, but where the focus is on data rather than
documents. The Semantic Web as a whole continues to grow much more slowly,
in part due its technical complexity and in part due to the lack of data in the right
format—the growth of the Linked Data Web is overcoming this last impedance.
The purpose of this topic is to provide an explanation of the Semantic Web and
Linked Data from the perspective of GI, and from a different angle, it shows how
GI can be represented as Linked Data within the Semantic Web. How you view the
topic will depend on who you are and what knowledge of these topics you already
have. The readership is intended to be quite varied. You may be someone who knows
about GI but little about the Semantic Web or Linked Data; conversely, you may
know something of the Semantic Web and Linked Data but little of dealing with GI;
and of course you may wish to find out more about both. Even if your primary aim is
to find out about the Semantic Web and Linked Data and you are not that interested
in GI, the topic still has much to offer as the examples we give are not unique to GI.
We also intend this topic to be very much an introduction and have tried to write
it in a manner that makes it accessible both to those with a technical mind for IT and
to those who may not be so technically knowledgeable of IT but still have to be aware
of the nature and potential for these topics, perhaps as managers, business leaders,
or end users.
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