The History:
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)). Dr. 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. As such, the GeoWeb would be characterized by the self synchronisation of network addressing, time and location. The GeoWeb would allow location to be used to self organize all geospatially referenced data available through the Internet.

Another early reference to the concept of the GeoWeb is the Genasys Spatial Web Broker. Development of this capability began in 1994 and was officially announced in 1996. This product was designed to allow any web developer to integrate GIS functions, such as routing, into portal applications, e-government applications, and e-business applications.