Exploring the Geospatial Semantic Web with DBpedia Mobile

The Geospatial Semantic Web makes locations first-class citizens of the Web by representing them as original Web resources. This allows locations to be described in an open and distributed manner using the Resource Description Framework and provides for interlinking data about locations between data sources. In addition to using geo-coordinates to express geographical proximity, the Geospatial Semantic Web provides for relating locations as well as regions to each other using explicit semantic relationship types such as containment or shared borders. This article gives an overview of the Geospatial Semantic Web and describes DBpedia Mobile, a location-aware Semantic Web client that can be used on an iPhone and other mobile devices. Based on the current GPS position, DBpedia Mobile renders a map indicating nearby locations from the DBpedia data set. Starting from this map, the user can explore background information about his surroundings by navigating along data links into other data sources. DBpedia Mobile has been designed for the use case of a tourist exploring a city. Besides accessing Web data, DBpedia Mobile also enables users to publish their current location, pictures and reviews to the Semantic Web so that they can be used by other Semantic Web applications. Instead of simply being tagged with geographical coordinates, published content is interlinked with a nearby DBpedia resource and thus contributes to the overall richness of the Geospatial Semantic Web.