Benchmarking Link Discovery Systems for Geo-Spatial Data

Linking geo-spatial entities is targeted only by a limited number of link discovery benchmarks. Linking spatial resources requires techniques that differ from the classical, mostly string-based approaches. In particular, considering the topology of the spatial resources and the topological relations between them is of central importance to systems that manage spatial data. Due to the large amount of available geospatial Linked Data datasets, it is critical that benchmarks for geo-spatial link discovery systems are developed that can determine the effectiveness and the efficiency of the proposed techniques. In this paper, we propose a Spatial Benchmark generator that deals with link discovery for spatial data. Our benchmark generator can be used to test the performance of systems that deal with all the topological relations proposed in the state of the art DE-9IM (Dimensionally Extended nine-Intersection) model in the two dimensional space. We also provide a comparative analysis with benchmarks produced using the Spatial Benchmark generator to assess and identify the capabilities of RADON and Silk, two of the state of the art systems.