OF4OSM: Ontology from Folksonomy for OpenStreetMap

Model, method and tools for building a knowledge base from the OpenStreetMap folksonomy: the OF4OSM ontology.

Principle

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a citizen science project that aims at building a spatial database of the World. The geographic features represented in this database (buildings, highways, land use, etc.) are described via geometries (points, ways and polygones) and attributes by the OSM community. The attributes, also called tags, are represented by a key=value pair. For instance, amenity=school describes a school. The OSM folksonomy is the unstructured bag that contains all these OSM tags. Tags are very convenient to use for the OSM contributors. However, the lack of structure inherent to the OSM folksonomy is a major obstacle both for data acquisition and data retrieval. The OF4OSM project aims at semantically lifting the OSM folksonomy into an OSM knowledge base under the form of an ontology : OF4OSM.

What the OF4OSM project does:

1. Takes a bounding box (bbox) as input
2. Retrieves OSM tags on the given bbox
3. Outputs an ontology axtracted from the retrieved OSM tags

Download

Download all-in-one Java archive distribution: of4osm-distrib-1.0.jar

Usage

How to use the .jar file:

1. Find the bbox of your study area. The boundingbox.klokantech.com Web site can help here. The bbox must be of the form bbox1 bbox2 bbox3 bbox4. For example, the bbox enclosing the city of Grenoble is: 5.677606 45.15414 5.753118 45.214077

2. Run the of4osm-distrib-1.0.jar file with the bbox as first argument:

java -jar of4osm-distrib-1.0.jar "bbox1 bbox2 bbox3 bbox4"

For example, for Grenoble:

java -jar of4osm-distrib-1.0.jar "5.677606 45.15414 5.753118 45.214077"

3. Open the output ontology (.owl file) that has been dumped to your current directory (the ontology editor Protégé can help here).

Modules

OF4OSM is a multi-module project composed of the following submodules:

• CORE: Model and default implementation of the OF4OSM project
  of4osm-core

• IMPL: Default implementation of the of4osm-core module
  of4osm-impl

• WS: Tools for querying OpenStreetMap oriented Web Services
  of4osm-ws

• TOOLS: Tools for manipulating the OSM folksonomy and OF4OSM ontology
  of4osm-tools

• DISTRIB: The distribution module for building a single-jar of the whole OF4OSM project
  of4osm-distrib