Workshop Report: Linking Geospatial Data

Today the W3C announced the final report from the Linking Geospatial Data workshop that was held in London 5 - 6 March 2014.

The report contains a summary of each of the major themes discussed and conclusions arising from them. The workshop was supported by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), Google, the UK mapping agency Ordnance Survey and the UK government. W3C's participation was funded by the EU-funded SmartOpenData project.

Participants included many geospatial experts from both the government and private sectors, and the presented papers focused on integrating geospatial information systems with the Web of Data. Although carefully advertised so as not to promote Linked Data to the exclusion of other methods, this emerged strongly as the preferred technology to enable that integration.

The Workshop report identifies several themes that recurred throughout the discussion. A consensus of the participants was that joint work between W3C and OGC should be pursued to address the needs identified in these themes.