Comparing vocabularies for representing geographical features and their geometry
Ghislain Auguste Atemezing · 2012
Abstract. The need for geolocation is crucial for many applications for both human and software agents. More and more data is opened and interlinked using Linked Data principles, and it is worth modeling geographic data efficiently by reusing as much as possible from existing ontologies or vocabularies that describe both the geospatial features and their shapes. In this paper, we survey different modeling approaches used by the Geographic Information System (GIS) and the Linked Open Data (LOD) communities. Our aim is to contribute to the actual efforts in representing geographic objects with attributes such as location, points of interest (POI) and addresses in the web of data. We focus on the French territory and we provide examples of representative vocabularies that can be used for describing geographic objects. We propose some alignments between various vocabularies (DBpedia, Geonames, Schema.org, Linked-GeoData, Foursquare, etc.) in order to enable interoperability while interconnecting French geodata with other datasets. We tackle the complex geometry representation issues in the Web of Data, describing the state of implementations of geo-spatial functions in triple stores and comparing them to the new GeoSPARQL standard. We conclude with some challenges to be taken into account when dealing with the descriptions of complex geometries.