An ontology for OpenStreetMap tags

Gregor Horsinka, DFKI

Details about the talk:
An ontology for OpenStreetMap tags

OpenStreetMap (OSM) provides a great variety of tags for elements of the maps,
offering thus information about them. OSM tags have a very dynamic evolution, given by the
collaborative and community-based nature of OSM: contributors can introduce new tags,
and tags can be changed due to community decisions and so on. Currently, the tags are
described via a Wiki page, but the description is incomplete and not
always up-to-date. We propose to organize the OSM tags in an ontology, while
staying as close as possible to the structure of OSM files. This has several advantages: (1) the tags are organised in a hierarchy that can be visualised with standard ontology editors like Protégé; (2) more complex concepts can be built from OSM tags, using the ontology language OWL; (3) one can use modern techniques like ontology-based data access to query the OSM files.

To illustrate the use of the ontology of OSM tags, we present an application we
developed in our project, for finding locations on a map not only by address, but
also by the type of activity one wants to perform. This has been realized as a web-based
service, called DO-ROAM - Activity-Oriented Search and Navigation with OpenStreetMap (http://do-roam.org).
The intended use cases are exploring a new city or planning leisure activities:
this is reflected by the nature of activities that the user can search for. For
each activity, an OWL class term based on tags is assigned.

Details about the speaker:
Born in 1987 in Bremen, Germany
2007 Abitur
2007-2009 study of physics at University Ulm and University Bremen, not completed
since 2009 study of Geography at University Bremen

Theme: research