Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 1.
Schematic map (1846) showing
principal
mountains and rivers of the world [73]
of England, such as Scafell Pike, the tallest mountain in England at a relative
height of 912 meters, would barely be hills in the Himalayas.
Apart from the notion of context based on local jurisdictions and communities,
since geospatial terms like
mountain
are based on perception, their meanings can
be highly situation-dependent. For example, imagine a geo-semantics informed
location-based service that is designed to give wayfinding instructions. A hu-
man that gives a route description might say, “take a right and walk toward
the mountain,” where the mountain in question is a clearly identifiable higher-
elevation landmark feature. The meaning of
mountain
in this case is not based
on any canonical definition but entirely on the situated context of the given
route [13,6].
How does this impact searching and integrating geo-data in the Linked Data
Cloud and the Semantic Web? Let us assume you areinterested in studying the role
of the forest industry in rural economics. For instance, you may be interested in
migration and depopulation, government policies, or the changing role of forestry
in the context of ecological and amenity services. While we will use a simplified
example here, this use case is real and was, for instance, addressed by Elands and
Wiersum [26]. Suppose terms such as
forest
,
town
,
farm
,and
countryside
are used
