The concept of a Geospatial Web may have first been introduced by Dr. Charles Herring in his US DoD paper, An Architecture of Cyberspace: Spatialization of the Internet, 1994, U.S. Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (40°8′58.9″N 88°16′22.7″W / 40.149694°N 88.272972°W / 40.149694; -88.272972 (U.S. Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratory)).
Herring proposed that the problem of defining the physical domain in a computer or cyber-infrastructure, providing real time and appropriate fidelity, required a cyber-spatial reference or index combining both Internet Addressing and Hierarchical Spatial Addressing.
The interest in a Geoweb has been advanced by new technologies, concepts and products, specifically the popularization of GPS positioning with the introduction of the iPhone in 2007.
In order to make information accessible from geographically oriented applications, coordinate metadata must be created via some form of geocoding or geoparsing process.
After obtaining geographic coordinates, they must be indexed in useful ways that allow people to interact with the non-geographic nature of the content, e.g. viewing photographs or keyword searching.