GIS and the Web – what's the problem?

Slides

The standards that underpin geospatial data all use Web technologies, notably XML which first became a W3C standard on 10 February 1998. So how come integrating geospatial data with other data on the Web is so hard and often requires manual intervention? Web applications often need to access small parts of multiple large datasets, search engines need to match unstructured text on the Web with locations, data publishers have a lot of choice in how they share their data but which of the many available standards is best for a given context? These problems and more arise at least in part from the difference in culture between the geospatial world in which the primary reference is to a point, line or polygon, and the Web where the primary reference is the identifier, the URI, of a document, a concept, a building or a data point - one property of which might be a location.

A workshop on this topic organised by the EU's SmartOpenData project in March 2014 lead directly to a collaborative effort between the two key standards bodies: the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). W3C's Data Activity Lead, Phil Archer, will reflect on the problems that have been identified and what needs to be done if the two ecosystems are to benefit from each other's data.