Automatically Constructing Geospatial Feature Taxonomies from OpenStreetMap Data

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Basel Shbita, Craig A. Knoblock

Published: 01 Jan 2024, Last Modified: 07 Oct 2025ICSC 2024EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: This paper presents a method for constructing a lightweight taxonomy of geospatial features using OpenStreetMap (OSM) data. Leveraging the OSM data model, our process mines frequent tags to efficiently produce a structured hierarchy, enriching the semantic representation of geo-features. This data-driven taxonomy supports various geospatial analysis applications. Accompanying the methodology, we release the source code of our tool and demonstrate its practical application with tailored taxonomies for California (US) and Greece, underscoring our approach’s adaptability and scalability.