Linking Geoscience Entity Mentions to the Web of Data

In data intensive applications, data are often retrieved from multiple sources and across various domain topics. Entity recognition and linking among the heterogeneous datasets are of great value in data integration and reuse. Detecting and linking entity mentions in datasets can be facilitated by using knowledge bases on the Web, such as ontologies and vocabularies. The number of ontologies and vocabularies, including those in the field of geosciences, has been continually increasing. Those are valuable contributions to the Web of Data, and also provide a nice environment for the task of detecting and linking entity mentions. In this work we built a web-based entity linking and wikification service for datasets, such as textural document, in the domain of Earth and environmental science. Our current demo system uses DBPedia as the knowledge base, and we have been collecting geoscience ontologies and vocabularies to enrich the knowledge base. In general, the more precise and comprehensive the knowledge base is, the better the result we can receive in entity recognition and linking.