ABSTRACT
Consideration of geosemantic Web standards for a spatial information infrastructure (SII) raises a series of questions: What is the nature of spatial information infrastructure? What role do standards play in promoting interoperability? What is the balance between imposition of uniform information standards and semantic mediation between disparate information standards? This chapter examines the case that reasonable expectations for effective SIIs do require intrinsic support for spatial information interoperability. Geosemantic (i.e. geographically grounded spatial semantic) interoperability is an especially unique aspect of SII requirements; it is shown to depend upon many more subtleties of meaning and levels of interoperability than just shared vocabularies. Particular geosemantic interoperability “pain points” in SII are illustrated by simple examples of cognitive and pragmatic heterogeneity in spatial information sharing. Although geosemantic technologies show some promise of reducing the extent of this reliance, their present state of development suggests that SII will need to rely, at least in the near term, upon widespread adoption of standard geosemantic foundation ontologies. Categories of geosemantic ontologies that are the most likely candidates for initial geosemantic Web standards include features,
feature types, feature data sets, spatial relationships, place names (toponyms), coordinate reference/spatial index systems and spatial services.
