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Moon Landing or Safari? A Study of Systematic Errors and Their Causes in Geographic Linked Data

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Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 9927))

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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.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://lodlaundromat.org/.

  2. 2.

    http://www.taxonconcept.org/.

  3. 3.

    http://data.nytimes.com/.

  4. 4.

    http://www.rkbexplorer.com/.

  5. 5.

    http://stats.lod2.eu/.

  6. 6.

    A high resolution version that gives a better impression of the coverage as well as various errors is available at http://stko.geog.ucsb.edu/pictures/lstd_map.png.

  7. 7.

    SPARQL: ASK WHERE \(\mathtt{<}\) http://dbpedia.org/resource/Earth \(\mathtt{>}\) \(\mathtt{<}\) http://dbpedia.org/property/flattening \(\mathtt{> 1.}\) [using DBpedia 2015-04.].

  8. 8.

    E.g. via, wget http://sws.geonames.org/6252001/nearby.rdf.

  9. 9.

    http://dbpedia.org/resource/HMS_Victory.

  10. 10.

    The way in which DBpedia uses cardinal directions can be easily misunderstood. The triple states that the entity south of Ventura is the city of Oxnard.

  11. 11.

    http://data.nytimes.com/N2261955445337191084.

  12. 12.

    The views presented in this paper belong to the authors and do not necessarily represent the views or positions of the entire working group. A current draft of the best practice report is available at: https://www.w3.org/TR/sdw-bp/.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge partial support by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under award 1440202 EarthCube Building Blocks: Collaborative Proposal: GeoLink Leveraging Semantics and Linked Data for Data Sharing and Discovery in the Geosciences, NSF award 1540849 EarthCube IA: Collaborative Proposal: Cross-Domain Observational Metadata Environmental Sensing Network (X-DOMES), and the USGS award on Linked Data for the National Map.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. STKO Lab, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

    Krzysztof Janowicz, Yingjie Hu, Song Gao, Blake Regalia, Gengchen Mai & Rui Zhu

  2. Department of Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park, USA

    Grant McKenzie

  3. Centre for eResearch, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Benjamin Adams

  4. Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

    Kerry Taylor

Authors
  1. Krzysztof Janowicz
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  2. Yingjie Hu
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  4. Song Gao
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  5. Blake Regalia
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  6. Gengchen Mai
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  7. Rui Zhu
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  8. Benjamin Adams
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Correspondence to Krzysztof Janowicz .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Texas at Austin , Austin, Texas, USA

    Jennifer A. Miller

  2. University of California at Berkeley , Berkeley, California, USA

    David O'Sullivan

  3. University of Wisconsin-Madison , Madison, Wisconsin, USA

    Nancy Wiegand

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Janowicz, K. et al. (2016). Moon Landing or Safari? A Study of Systematic Errors and Their Causes in Geographic Linked Data. In: Miller, J., O'Sullivan, D., Wiegand, N. (eds) Geographic Information Science. GIScience 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9927. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45738-3_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45738-3_18

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