Next Generation Geospatial Information

Since the early 2000s, far more geographic data can be gathered and kept than before, and the mix of formats and sources it comes in has grown just as fast. That abundance brings both difficulties and openings. Today's users lean heavily on the underlying geospatial data infrastructure, and whether that data can be reached, how well it is organized, and how it is modeled, indexed and searched have become central to many applications. Structuring and describing data in a formal way is also key to combining datasets and making different systems work together, a need made more pressing by distributed infrastructure and web-based services.

This volume gathers original papers from leading researchers in spatial information modeling, image processing and analysis, database management, ontologies and data mining. Its aim is to show where the field currently stands and which challenges lie ahead in geospatial information.

The book is organized around four central research themes. It covers distributed spatial infrastructure, the management of geospatial information derived from images, the indexing and querying of geospatial databases, and ontologies and semantics applied to geospatial data.