Buzzwords

James Fee has been having fun with buzzwords and phrases. "GeoWeb" (or "Geospatial Web", or "Geospatial Semantic Web") is the one that really gets to me. I've used it a bit, and always feel like a snake oil salesman when I do. It's marketing: anybody who uses it without scare quotes is probably trying to sell you something.

The meaning of the term "World Wide Web" has also become diluted with time, but it does have a documented architecture that geeks like me can rally to. I know people who hate to read this, and feel that it verges on FUD, but the GIS industry has not been big on Web architecture. Our services are essentially (I'm singling out WFS here) relational database create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) operations wrapped in XML, tunneling over HTTP. True, a lot of the conventional non-geo Web is like this too, but it's the resources that link and provide hypertext navigation that make the Web into a singular application.

On the brighter side, I do think that KML is putting the "Web" back in "GeoWeb" by encouraging people to develop geospatial applications that use the architecture of the Web. Google obviously benefits from growing the Web (there's the marketing element again), but a return to Web architecture is also a win for the rest of us.