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Support GeoSPARQL in Wikidata Query Service
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Description

As a linked data user especially interested in geospatial data, I want to use GeoSPARQL features on the Wikidata Query Service so that I don’t have to learn any Wikidata-specific services.

Problem:
WDQS offers two services for geospatial search (wikibase:around and wikibase:box), but both of them are Wikidata-specific and require you to even know that they exist. I recently talked to someone at a conference who wanted to use GeoSPARQL, which seems to be the most popular geospatial extension for SPARQL, on the Wikidata query service; they weren’t even aware that our two custom services existed, and I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect every user to learn that (we’re not the only SPARQL endpoint in the world).

Event Timeline

Smalyshev triaged this task as Medium priority.Nov 8 2018, 7:01 AM
Smalyshev lowered the priority of this task from Medium to Low.Feb 22 2019, 11:37 PM

Let's say I want to find all battlefields of history, and I am only interested in those in Russia (Q159).

If I query with P17:Q159 I will get almost none, because most are, rightly, in Soviet Russia (Q18166397) and in the various previous empires of the area, some of whom are bigger than my area of study.

Battlefields in Russia is only an example, but this is a rather common need.
GeoSPARQL might be a way to enable such queries, if country/region polygons are available and efficiently usable.
Thank you for your consideration! :-)

https://github.com/Sophox/sophox/issues/17 is about GeoSPARQL in Sophox, the OpenStreetMap SPARQL endpoint.
It uses Blazegraph (and Wikibase for OSM tags.keys).