Conciliating perspectives from mapping agencies and web of data on successful European SDIs: Toward a European geographic knowledge graph

Abstract

Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) are a key asset for Europe. This paper concentrates on unsolved issues in SDIs in Europe related to the management of semantic heterogeneities. It studies contributions and competences from two communities in this field: cartographers, authoritative data providers, and geographic information scientists on the one hand, and computer scientists working on the Web of Data on the other. During several workshops organized by the EuroSDR and Eurogeographics organizations, the authors analyzed their complementarity and discovered reasons for the difficult collaboration between these communities. They have different and sometimes conflicting perspectives on what successful SDIs should look like, as well as on priorities. We developed a proposal to integrate both perspectives, which is centered on the elaboration of an open European Geographical Knowledge Graph. Its structure reuses results from the literature on geographical information ontologies. It is associated with a multifaceted roadmap addressing interrelated aspects of SDIs.