Introduction

Hello,

My name is Frans Knibbe, I have just joined the WG.

I am an employee of Geodan, a Dutch company specialized in spatial 
information. I work at the research department, a few people trying to 
find out what will be hot in our playing field.

I have done a lot of practical work with geographical data and trying to 
achieve interoperability. Among that work were a few projects that used 
INSPIRE to achieve internationally distributed systems (Spatial Data 
Infrastructures). I encountered a lot of tenacious problems with the 
then-current technologies and discovering the Linked Data concept felt 
like a relief. I still think that getting spatial data out of its own 
domain and bring it to the common web is a brilliant idea and will have 
many benefits for geoinformatics, the data web, and society as a whole.

What I think is mostly needed at the moment is to standardize 
geographical data on the web at the core. We need to arrive at global 
agreement on how to encode geography and how to use its related 
functions. I would like to see geography becoming a real primitive data 
type, just like text and numbers. And I would like to see standards to 
cater for both casual users and experts.

I hope I can make a meaningful contribution to the work of this WG and I 
look forward to working with you!

Regards,
Frans



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Frans Knibbe
Geodan
President Kennedylaan 1
1079 MB Amsterdam (NL)

T +31 (0)20 - 5711 347
E frans.knibbe@geodan.nl
www.geodan.nl <http://www.geodan.nl> | disclaimer 
<http://www.geodan.nl/disclaimer>
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