Towards Linked Data and ontology development for the semantic enrichment of volunteered geo-information

The increasing volume of Volunteered Geo-information (VGI) often remains hidden and unconnected to other sources of information, and therefore hampering its reuse. A better understanding of the semantics behind VGI and its resources can relieve this issue, facilitated by the use of lightweight Semantic Web tools for the visualization, exploration and querying of Linked Data. The support of the publication of VGI-system descriptions on the Web eases the reuse of VGI, which in its turn supports the demand for a better spatial coverage of volunteered geo-information. This paper describes an approach for the collaborative development of an ontology of VGI concepts and the creation of Linked Data for real-life VGI resources. A corpus of VGI concepts and resources are drawn from the ENERGIC project. The paper demonstrates how these resources can be integrally accessed through a visual query environment.