ABSTRACT
The use of Geographic Information (GI) has been well established within the information technology community for a long time and is becoming increasingly important as a means to enable geographic analysis and as an aid to integrate data. 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, an integral and essential part of the Semantic Web, refers to a way of publishing structured data on the Web and interlinking it. The Semantic Web is about reasoning over data and integrating data; it therefore makes sense that GI, as an enabler for integration, and the Semantic Web are natural bedfellows. The notion of Linked Data itself can be traced to the very origins of the Semantic Web; however, the term Linked Data was only established later. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
