Geographical Service: a compass for the Web of Data

This paper describes a Linked Data service that supports the navigation and retrieval of geographical entities for the UK territory. Geographical entities, in the extent of this paper, are linked data resources that describe objects that have a geographical extension. The service presented in this paper allows the querying of resources that contain or are contained by a given entity URI. The recent publication of UK Public Sector Information (PSI) data sets has brought to the attention of the community the redundant presence of location based context. At the same time it stresses the inadequacy of current Linked Data services for exploiting the semantics of such contextual dimensions for easing entity retrieval and browsing. We present an approach for a geography based service that helps in querying qualitative spatial relations for the UK geography (proper containment so far). We also provide an exploitation scenario based on a backlinking service and PSI Open Linked Data, published within the EnAKTing project.