  This paper is concerned with the semilinear damped wave equation on a measure
space with a self-adjoint operator, instead of the standard Laplace operator.
Under a certain decay estimate on the corresponding heat semigroup, we
establish the linear estimates which generalize the so-called Matsumura
estimates, and prove the small data global existence of solutions to the damped
wave equation based on the linear estimates. Our approach is based on a direct
spectral analysis analogous to the Fourier analysis. The self-adjoint operators
treated in this paper include some important examples such as the Laplace
operators on Euclidean spaces, the Dirichlet Laplacian on an arbitrary open
set, the Robin Laplacian on an exterior domain, the Schr\"odinger operator, the
elliptic operator, the Laplacian on Sierpinski gasket, and the fractional
Laplacian.
