# Linking Streets in OpenStreetMap to Persons in Wikidata

## TL;DR

This paper introduces StreetToPerson, a method for linking streets in OpenStreetMap to persons in Wikidata based on relations and spatial data, significantly improving connection accuracy and enabling large-scale mapping.

## Contribution

The paper presents a novel approach for connecting OSM streets to Wikidata persons, outperforming existing methods by 26 percentage points and applying it to all streets in Germany.

## Key findings

- Outperforms existing approaches by 26 percentage points
- Identifies over 180,000 street-person links in Germany
- Enables large-scale geographic-knowledge graph integration

## Abstract

Geographic web sources such as OpenStreetMap (OSM) and knowledge graphs such as Wikidata are often unconnected. An example connection that can be established between these sources are links between streets in OSM to the persons in Wikidata they were named after. This paper presents StreetToPerson, an approach for connecting streets in OSM to persons in a knowledge graph based on relations in the knowledge graph and spatial dependencies. Our evaluation shows that we outperform existing approaches by 26 percentage points. In addition, we apply StreetToPerson on all OSM streets in Germany, for which we identify more than 180,000 links between streets and persons.