Abstract

Nowadays, geospatial information plays a critical role to each and every one of us. Searching and obtaining the right geospatial information, however, is a difficult and often very time-consuming task. The Semantic Web promises to facilitate this process by improving the capability to search for information by better expressing the context and meaning of the search query. Combining the two approaches to create a Geospatial Semantic Web is an idea that is gaining acceptance in both areas of Geospatial Information Science and Semantic Web Services. Here, we present a prototype that promises to prove that the meshing of these two fields is a promising field especially in conjunction with information retrieval and ubiquitous computing environments. The aim of this prototype is to exploit a hybrid of geospatial semantic information retrieved from multiple data sources in a mobile environment. Our prototype uses three geospatial data sources: GeoNames, LinkedGeoData, and DBpedia. Experimental results show how the merging of the three geospatial data sources and the use of more than one level of indexing is more effective in terms of recall and precision in comparison to another system.