Linking Streets in OpenStreetMap to Persons in Wikidata
This addresses the issue of unconnected geographic and knowledge graph data for users in mapping and data integration, though it is incremental as it builds on existing linking methods.
The paper tackles the problem of linking streets in OpenStreetMap to persons in Wikidata, presenting StreetToPerson, which outperforms existing approaches by 26 percentage points and identifies over 180,000 links for streets in Germany.
Geographic web sources such as OpenStreetMap (OSM) and knowledge graphs such as Wikidata are often unconnected. An example connection that can be established between these sources are links between streets in OSM to the persons in Wikidata they were named after. This paper presents StreetToPerson, an approach for connecting streets in OSM to persons in a knowledge graph based on relations in the knowledge graph and spatial dependencies. Our evaluation shows that we outperform existing approaches by 26 percentage points. In addition, we apply StreetToPerson on all OSM streets in Germany, for which we identify more than 180,000 links between streets and persons.