Moon landing or safari? A study of systematic errors and their causes in geographic linked data

Abstract

While the adoption of Linked Data technologies has grown dramatically over the past few years, it has not come without its own set of growing challenges. The triplification of domain data into Linked Data has not only given rise to a leading role of places and positioning information for the dense interlinkage of data about actors, objects, and events, but also led to massive errors in the generation, transformation, and semantic annotation of data. In a global and densely interlinked graph of data, even seemingly minor error can have far reaching consequences as different datasets make statements about the same resources. In this work we present the first comprehensive study of systematic errors and their potential causes. We also discuss lessons learned and means to avoid some of the introduced pitfalls in the future.