The Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web group has announced a new release of LinkedGeoData. According to the announcement, “The aim of the LinkedGeoData (LGD) project is to make the OpenStreetMap (OSM) datasets easily available as RDF. As such the main target audience is the Semantic Web community, however it may turn out to be useful to a much larger audience. Additionally, we are providing interlinking with DBpedia and GeoNames and integration of class labels from translatewiki and icons from the Brian Quinion Icon Collection.”

The article continues, “The result is a rich, open, and integrated dataset which we hope to be useful for research and application development. The datasets can be publicly accessed via downloads, Linked Data, and SPARQL-endpoints. We have also launched an experimental “Live-SPARQL-endpoint” that is synchronized with the minutely updates from OSM whereas the changes to our store are republished as RDF.”

The article goes on, “The improvements over the somewhat aged previous release in the middle of 2009 can be summarized as: (1) Better data quality thanks to a more flexible mapping system. (2) Spatial query support as supported by OpenLink’s Virtuoso enterprise edition. (3) Two Sparql-endpoints: one containing the data of the most recent LGD release, and one experimental one synchronzied with OpenStreetMap.org! (4) More interlinking. (5) Improvements on the LGD-Browser (however this is work in progress).”

Image: Courtesy Flickr/ foto.bulle