Geospatial Technologies are used to describe the range of modern tools contributing to the geographic mapping and analysis of the Earth and human societies. It is an emerging field of study that includes Geographic Information System (GIS), Remote Sensing (RS) and Global Positioning System (GPS). Geospatial technology enables us to acquire data that is referenced to the earth and use it for analysis, modeling, simulations and visualization. Geospatial technology allows us to make informed decisions based on the importance and priority of resources most of which are limited in nature. Geospatial technology may be used to create intelligent maps and models that may be interactively queried to get the desired results in a STEM application or may be used to advocate social investigations and policy based research. It may be used to reveal spatial patterns that are embedded in large volumes of data that may not be accessed collectively or mapped otherwise. Geospatial technology has become an essential part of everyday life. It’s used to track everything from personal fitness to transportation to changes on the surface of the earth.
The amount of cultural digital data related to heritage sites is growing rapidly. The digital heritage repositories have become big enough to exploit and disseminate enormous knowledge out of it. However, most cultural repositories all over the world share a common challenge - to integrate data and interoperate among them. The results produce poorly linked cultural data, with inefficient interfaces, which fails in conceptualizing information for the users.
The geospatial semantic web is now being adopted by many heritage repositories to overcome the challenges. The aim of the geospatial Semantic Web research is to make information seeking easier by allowing exploration, editing and interlinking of heterogeneous information sources with a spatial dimension. Traditional Geographic Information Systems (GIS) offer rigid sets of geographic features. However, integrating external data sets into these systems typically requires manual integration and programming efforts to ensure that the meaning of the provided information will be processable. However, combining the strengths of Linked Data and GIS systems could spur the transition from islands of isolated Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to a geospatially enriched Linked Data Web where geographic information can easily be integrated and processed. GeoKnow, LinkedGeoData, Datalift, TELEIOS, Places CG, etc, are some of the projects where geospatial semantic web is employed.