Semantic web technologies have become increasingly popular within a broad range of domains and disciplines. This paper deals with the application of such technologies in the geosciences. This is a very interesting case because of the early and quite successful adoption of semantic technologies by geoscientists to integrate formal semantics into their systems. That activity has intrinsically defined an independent domain-specific community in the field of geosciences, which seems to work almost independently from the broad semantic web community.

The existence of a domain-specific community of researchers interested in the application of semantic technologies is a very positive fact in itself. Indeed, on one hand, researchers from a given application domain are able to fully understand the specific problems and the peculiarities of the discipline, with both requirements and constraints related to concrete problems; on the other hand, they should know the technology to adopt and are, therefore, able to implement concrete solutions, to provide useful feedback, as well as to point out limitations and trade-offs.

However, regardless of the theoretical scenario that would suggest a close cooperation between the communities, it is not clear if and, eventually, how the two communities are currently interacting with each other. From the analysis of the community as a whole, the authors of the paper consider that semantic geoscience research is still in the technical development and evaluation phase. Furthermore, they detect a minimal overlap between the activity of the two communities, although there is evidence of a possible upward trend. Finally, most applications of semantic technologies in geoscience concern relatively simple semantics, mostly in the context of data aggregation.

I found this paper well structured, informative, and interesting.