Geospatial information infrastructures

Manual of Digital Earth / Editors: Huadong Guo, Michael F. Goodchild, Alessandro Annoni .- Springer, 2020 .- ISBN: 978-981-32-9915-3Geospatial information infrastructures (GIIs) provide the technological, semantic,organizationalandlegalstructurethatallowforthediscovery,sharing,and use of geospatial information (GI). In this chapter, we introduce the overall concept and surrounding notions such as geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial datainfrastructures(SDI).WeoutlinethehistoryofGIIsintermsoftheorganizational andtechnologicaldevelopmentsaswellasthecurrentstate-of-art,andreflectonsome of the central challenges and possible future trajectories. We focus on the tension betweenincreasedneedsforstandardizationandtheever-acceleratingtechnological changes. We conclude that GIIs evolved as a strong underpinning contribution to implementation of the Digital Earth vision. In the future, these infrastructures are challengedtobecomeflexibleandrobustenoughtoabsorbandembracetechnological transformationsandtheaccompanyingsocietalandorganizationalimplications.With this contribution, we present the reader a comprehensive overview of the field and a solid basis for reflections about future developments

Semantics, metadata, geographical information and users

Semantics is concerned with analysing the meaning encoded in language (Calvani 2004). Within a technical description of data, semantic descriptions ought to be an important adjunct, filling out the labels and codings of classes and providing justification for measurements. Semantics are equally applicable whether applied to single word labels (Building, Tree, etc.), short phrases (coniferous forest, upland moors, etc.), or to longer textual descriptions of a phenomenon. Data semantics also includes the general description of a dataset and its characteristics and limitations. Spatial data and their semantics vary for a variety of reasons that are not to do with differences in the feature being measured. In the creation of any spatial data there are a series of choices about what to map and how to map it which will depend on a range of commissioning and institutional factors. Different choices result in different representations and variation between datasets. The variability between different, but equally valid, mappings of the same real world objects ultimately points to the social construction of spatial data (Harvey and Chrisman 1998). Much valuable geographical information is therefore embedded in its semantics