Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Opening up the map (07 Sep 2005) One strand of semantic web development which has seen some early success has been the practice of tagging web pages with location data - known as geotagging. For example the author of a website can tag a web page with the location of their home city or tag a photograph with the location where it was taken. These pages can then be automatically added to maps at aggregating websites such as geourl.org or geobloggers.com which make explicit the hidden relationships between websites and physical sites. These aggregators also allow people to search for websites using geographical criteria, such as within 10km of a particular website. This practice is giving rise to what has become known as the geospatial web. In contrast to fully fledged GIS the emphasis is on ease of adoption and integration, meaning that thousands of people are gradually adding geospatial metadata which, as the network effect grows, becomes progressively more valuable. Article URL: http://www.nestafuturelab.org/viewpoint/art59.htm Read 134 more articles from NESTA Futurelab sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Researching creativity: an experiential methodology     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy