DOING GEOINFORMATICS WITH A WEB OF DATA

The World Wide Web and the Semantic Web have brought tremendous changes and opportunities to researches of almost all scientific disciplines. For the domain of geosciences, researchers in the small community of geoinformatics act as the pioneers to connect the geoscience community to the web science and computer science communities. The Semantic Web is an extension to the World Wide Web, aiming at transforming the current Web from a Web of Documents to a Web of Data. Giving freedom to data stimulates the progress of science. Among the various scientific disciplines, geoinformatics researchers take a leading role in constructing data repositories, defining metadata and data standards, providing best practices in data analysis, data sharing and data citation. Their work not only support geoscience research but also provide useful feedbacks to the web and computer sciences. If the wide application of computers has facilitated geoscience and Geoinformatics into an integration stage, then with the abundant data sources in the Web of Data and the fast-growing facilities for data storage, computation and communication, geoinformatics is in a transition from the integration stage to the intelligent stage. This presentation will introduce successful examples of applying Semantic Web technologies in data management, integration and analysis, and will discuss a few ideas on the methods and practices of efficiently leveraging geoinformatics for geoscience research.