The Internet has erased distance as an obstacle, setting all services and information close at hand. This is an astonishing accomplishment; however, none of the appeal, power, or grandeur of the virtual can deny our existence in a physical world in which location, proximity, and direction are fundamental attributes. These two worlds, virtual and physical, lie largely disjoint and, with rare exception, disconnected.
The next challenge awaiting Internauts is a grand unification of the physical and virtual worlds in which any geospatial location and orientation is as legitimate a virtual address as a traditional Web universal resource name. Integrating geospatial coordinates into the namespace of the Internet will permit the seamless overlay of the virtual onto the physical in which the entire three-dimensional world is a set of resource names. This namespace allows us to attach information and services to specific locations in the physical world. However, raw geospatial locations are no more useful or convenient than a naked IP address. The geospatial world will require a range and complexity of higher-level naming services that make the present day Internet domain name service look like child's play.
I will conduct a whirlwind tour of the issues of geospatial namespaces from the bottom up by surveying the technology of location awareness, briefly discussing the issues of geospatial addressing, and then turning to higher-order geospatial namespaces.