Beyond a growing commercial interest in mobile GIS and location services, there's deep geek fascination with web mapping and location hacking. After several years of early experiments by a first generation of geohackers, locative media artists, and psychogeographers, a second, larger wave of hackers are demonstrating some amazing tricks with Google Maps, Flickr, and del.icio.us. Meanwhile, a growing international cadre of open source digital geographers and frontier semantic hackers have been building first-generation working versions of powerful new open source web mapping service tools based on open standards like WMS (web map services) and WFS (web feature services), all built on GML (geographic markup language) and XML.

Out of this teeming ecosystem we can see the beginning shapes of a true geospatial web, inhabited by spatially tagged hypermedia as well as digital map geodata. Invisible cartographic attributes and user annotations will eventually be layered on every centimeter of a place and attached to every physical thing, visible and useful, in context, on low-cost, easy-to-use mobile devices.

The first-generation Internet and Web generated a huge amount of economic energy, and so will a Geospatial Web. While it is interesting to entertain ideas of early financial returns from geospatial web services, we all need to take a deep breath and perform a sober and unhyped assessment of where we are, and what we still need to do to enjoy the economic and creative benefits of a Geospatial Web. We can't afford a second dot-bust; investments and developments have to be smarter this time. In this talk, Liebhold reviews some of the things that we need to do in order to build a sustainable Geospatial Web.