Expanding the utility of geospatial knowledge bases by linking concepts to WikiText and to polygonal boundaries

Abstract

This vision paper argues that a geospatial knowledge base combining textual descriptions for concepts such as places, together with place types, semantic relations between concepts and, most importantly, polygonal geometries associated to the geospatial concepts, constitutes a valuable resource for researchers working on the computational modeling of spatial language. We describe a simple procedure for producing one such resource from existing open datasets, and discuss possible ways for moving beyond the current state-of-the-art within the general area of geospatial text mining, through studies supported by one such knowledge base.