GeomRDF: A Geodata Converter with a Fine-Grained Structured Representation of Geometry in the Web
This addresses the problem for national mapping agencies and users needing to publish geospatial data as Linked Data without requiring extensive semantic web expertise, though it is incremental as it builds on existing standards and tools.
The paper tackles the complexity of converting geospatial data from traditional GIS formats to Linked Data by introducing GeomRDF, a tool that simplifies this process and generates geometries in both GeoSPARQL WKT and structured RDF formats, validated on the French administrative units dataset.
In recent years, with the advent of the web of data, a growing number of national mapping agencies tend to publish their geospatial data as Linked Data. However, differences between traditional GIS data models and Linked Data model can make the publication process more complicated. Besides, it may require, to be done, the setting of several parameters and some expertise in the semantic web technologies. In addition, the use of standards like GeoSPARQL (or ad hoc predicates) is mandatory to perform spatial queries on published geospatial data. In this paper, we present GeomRDF, a tool that helps users to convert spatial data from traditional GIS formats to RDF model easily. It generates geometries represented as GeoSPARQL WKT literal but also as structured geometries that can be exploited by using only the RDF query language, SPARQL. GeomRDF was implemented as a module in the RDF publication platform Datalift. A validation of GeomRDF has been realized against the French administrative units dataset (provided by IGN France).