Linking Geographical Data for Government and Consumer Applications

Abstract

Given the influence of geography on our lives, it is of little surprise that this dimension runs through many of the data sets available on the Web as Linked Data, and plays a crucial ongoing role in many attempts to visualise and build applications upon these. The importance of opening access to governmental data resources is increasingly recognised, and those with a geographic flavour are no exception. In this chapter we describe how the national mapping agency of Great Britain approached the publication of various key data sets as Linked Data, detailing many of the data modelling decisions taken. We then explore a small sample of the applications that have been built on these and related data sets, demonstrating how governmental data sets can underpin government and consumer applications alike. The chapter concludes with presentation of a deployed approach for linking vast volumes of geographic data, thereby significantly increasing the density of links between geographic data sets in the Web of Data.