Template-based question answering over linked geospatial data

Large amounts of geospatial data have been made available recently on the linked open data cloud and on the portals of many national cartographic agencies (e.g., OpenStreetMap data, administrative geographies of various countries, or land cover/land use data sets). These datasets use various geospatial vocabularies and can be queried using SPARQL or its OGC-standardized extension GeoSPARQL. In this paper we go beyond these approaches to offer a question answering service on top of linked geospatial data sources. Our system has been implemented as re-usable components of the Qanary question answering architecture to provide benefits for future research tasks. We give a detailed description of the architecture of the system, its underlying algorithms and its evaluation using a set of 201 natural language questions.