WorldKG Project
Motivation
Knowledge graphs provide rich semantic representations of real-world entities and their relations. Whereas popular general-purpose knowledge graphs such as Wikidata and DBpedia contain selected geographic entities, their coverage of geographic information is limited. An essential source of openly available geographic information on the Web is OpenStreetMap (OSM). In contrast to knowledge graphs, OSM lacks a clear semantic representation of the rich geographic information it contains. Generation of semantic representations of OSM entities and their interlinking with knowledge graphs are inherently challenging due to the large, heterogeneous, ambiguous, and flat OSM schema and the annotation sparsity.
Goals
- Development of methods for world-scale alignment of OSM datasets and knowledge graphs at the schema and instance level.
- Preparation and release data resulting from these methods in form of the WorldKG knowledge graph that provides comprehensive semantic representation of geographical information and its context.
The results of the WorldKG project can substantially benefit applications in mobility, transportation, tourism and logistics domains, as well as provide a basis for informational maps and services through high quality semantic representation of geographical and contextual information.
Project Results
As a result of the WorldKG project, we have developed methods for knowledge graph completion and to establish links between OSM and knowledge graphs at the entity and schema levels. In particular, we create the OSM2KG approach that is aimed at interlinking the representations of entities between OSM and knowledge graphs. We present a novel NCA algorithm to link the OSM tags that provide entity-type information to the corresponding knowledge graph classes. As a result, we semantically enrich geospatial information in OSM and make this information available in WorldKG - a novel geographic knowledge graph.
