Interlinking and visualizing linked open data with geospatial reference data

An increasing number of thematic datasets are published as RDF graphs and linked to other datasets by identifying equivalent resources in other relevant datasets. Among the set of properties usually used as data linking criteria, geolocation (addresses, locations, coordinates ) remains one of the most commonly used. However, resources that actually refer to complex topographic features are generally described by very simple geolocation properties, such as a position defined by coordinates (long, lat). On the other hand, geographic reference datasets provide more precise geometric information about geographic features. Interlinking thematic linked open datasets with geographic reference datasets would enable us to take advantage of both information sources to link independent thematic datasets and create rich cartographic applications for data visualization. This data linking task is generally performed by comparing properties values of each resource of a given data set, with homologous properties of the resources described in other datasets [3]. In the field of geographic databases, data matching is also performed by comparing properties, and especially complex geometries (curves, lines, polygons) that are used to represent the shape and the location of geographic features. This task is usually based on distance measures chosen according to the type of the geometric primitives that must be compared [1, 2, 4, 5]. We aim at combining both approaches to link both thematic and geographical reference data and exploit the generated links in a data visualization application.