Revisiting the Representation of and Need for Raw Geometries on the Linked Data Web

Geospatial data on the Semantic Web historically stems from using point geometries to represent the geographic locations of places. As the practice evolved in the Semantic Web community, a demand for more complex geometries and geospatial query capabilities came about as a consequence of integrating traditional GIS and geo-data into the Linked Data cloud. However, recent projects have revealed that, in practice, these established techniques have major shortcomings that limit their storage, transmission, and query potential. In this position paper, we examine these shortcomings, propose to treat geometries similar to how other binary data are stored and referenced on the Semantic Web, namely by representing them as resources via URIs instead of RDF literals, and demonstrate the utility of precomputing topological relations rather than computing them on-demand by arguing that end users are most o‰en interested in topology and not raw geometries.