A Survey on the Techniques to Improve the Visibility of Geospatial Resources on the Web

Geographical information has become ubiquitous. The demand to access geospatial data on the web is growing in numerous knowledge domains and disciplines. For the sharing of geospatial data, geoportals acts as entryways to the SDI (spatial data infrastructure) from where the data is disseminated. Because these geoportals are limited to geoinformation communities only, they exhibit challenges in terms of indexing by web search engines. Thus, the geospatial resources need a boost in terms of visibility over the internet (web). In this chapter, a discussion on the present state of geospatial resources on the web and comparison of various methods that have been employed for increasing the discoverability of geographical resources is presented. Therefrom, by discussion, the chapter concludes with a conjecture regarding scope for the further improvement in the methods that have been reviewed, along with depicting the need for the presence of geospatial resources on the internet.