Semantic Web and service computation in GIScience applications: a perspective and prospective

Semantic Web and Web services have been two prominent themes in the computer science and IT mainstream for more than a decade. While both of these themes have been evolving, some geographers and GIScientists have been trying to introduce and adopt such new technologies into GIScience research and development. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art and the main constraints of semantic Web and Web services technologies and their applications in GIScience. Unless some fundamental problems within both semantic Web and Web services can be resolved, such technologies will be difficult to match the needs in the GIScience community. Besides logics, more sciences and theories have to be introduced into this research front in order to break through the long-term bottleneck in semantic Web and service computation in general.