Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

The Economist publishes an article on the Semantic Web. Not too technical, it provides a quick overview of what has happened and what could happen.

SOME new ideas take wing spontaneously. Others struggle to be born. The “semantic web” is definitely in the latter category. But it may have found its midwife in Reuters, a business-information company.

Reuters is not alone, of course. Yahoo!, desperate to gain a technological edge over its rival Google, recently endorsed a set of machine-readable formats that will make better sense of the information streaming through the vast universe of web sites it searches.

Radar Networks, based in San Francisco, is one example. Radar has launched a service called Twine, into which users can stuff any link, document or e-mail message they want and hope for some organising principle to emerge. If Twine fails (and reviews of the usefulness of its experimental “beta” version have been mixed) other small firms such as Powerset and Metaweb (also both based in San Francisco) and Hakia and Adaptive Blue (both from New York) stand ready to fill the breach.

Before Google had introduced satellite imagery applications to the general population, only few of us knew the true value of geospatial information. For example, most people know that satellite images are pretty pictures of the Earth. What they didn’t know is that the data extracted from these images can provide us with new information and intelligence that otherwise is impossible to obtain.

ESA Portal has an article that talks about how satellite images and geospatial technology are aiding the regional rebuild of 2004 Asian tsunami disaster.