From Floating Data to The Ground You Stand On: Creating an Internet of Places
The World Wide Web was originally created as a web of connected documents. What if that’s no longer an appropriate, or sufficient, metaphor? A group of geospatial data specialists today published a call for a new web architecture that would supplant the Internet of Documents with a spatio-temporal Internet of Places.
Published on the geotechnology industry site Directions Magazine, the call to action is titled The “Internet of Places” and was authored by Giuseppe Conti, Raffaele De Amicis, Federico Prandi (of Israeli CAD software company Graphitech) and Paul Watson of 30+ year old UK-based data quality and integration services company 1Spatial. The authors say that the old “publication-search-retrieval‟ paradigm has been carried through the Web 2.0 era of social media but the web now needs to be updated in order to take into account the connection between online content and geographic location.
"A significant proportion of the content available on the Internet has a spatial dimension,” the authors argue.
“This may be either explicit or implicit, for instance a place name within a document or the location of a place referred to within a tweet. However, if we take a look from a geospatial standpoint at the various types of Internet resources and applications used today, we see a fairly fragmented picture…An increasing number of real-time sensor data feeds and an unprecedented amount of unstructured crowdsourced information now complements standard geospatial resources…
Source: ReadWriteWeb