Geospatial Social Web? Lets invent stuff!

Sometime ago a term surfaced in the geospatial domain. It was “Geospatial Semantic Web”, whatever that means! One can assume it has to do with the application of semantic web technology to geospatial web applications, but you can never really be neither sure nor specific.

At the start of my research work I was very interested in the new social technologies collectively and widely termed Web 2. I thought there was hugh potential for the geospatial domain. I published a paper in AGILE 2007, which was just exploring possibilities of work and the paper was well received. I didn’t dare however to invent yet another new term such as that hanging up there as the title of my blog post. I thought one needs to be more conservative about inventing terms haphazardly if you really wanted to do serious science.

During the EC-GIS in Porto, an event which I didn’t attend but our colleague Eva Klien did attend. Someone in that meeting seemed to have used the term SDI 2.0!!! ain’t this funny? Scientists are acting much like freelance bloggers and internet geeks, just inventing terms without specific well defined meanings. Not a rare event in science (some sciences, not all) which I was made to view with a more careful eye in the face of such a nice article which I came to read lately. This article is a highly recommended read for many in the computer science/informatics fields. I do agree with the point the writer is trying to make and this point is very apparent in the Geoinformatics field, it is namely that there is lots of pseudoscience and not-so-scientific-work going on and we need to improve a bit more on that.

So why do I use the term “Geospatial Social Web” on my post title? well, my logic is that if someone dare invent such a term, I’d have the credit of being the first one to have mocked it, pre-invention! You do see the logical fallacy don’t you?

Written From: office, Weather: sunny intervals and warm, Mood: energetic and calm