Geospatial Question Answering on Historical Maps Using Spatio-Temporal Knowledge Graphs and Large Language Models

TL;DR

This paper presents GeoQA, a system that combines spatio-temporal knowledge graphs and large language models to enable natural language question answering on historical maps, integrating multiple data sources for accurate, interactive results.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel GeoQA framework that integrates spatio-temporal knowledge graphs with large language models for effective question answering on historical map data.

Findings

High semantic accuracy in generated answers

Effective integration of multiple data sources

Interactive web application for querying and visualization

Abstract

Recent advances have enabled the extraction of vectorized features from digital historical maps. To fully leverage this information, however, the extracted features must be organized in a structured and meaningful way that supports efficient access and use. One promising approach is question answering (QA), which allows users -- especially those unfamiliar with database query languages -- to retrieve knowledge in a natural and intuitive manner. In this project, we developed a GeoQA system by integrating a spatio-temporal knowledge graph (KG) constructed from historical map data with large language models (LLMs). Specifically, we have defined the ontology to guide the construction of the spatio-temporal KG and investigated workflows of two different types of GeoQA: factual and descriptive. Additional data sources, such as historical map images and internet search results, are incorporated into our framework to provide extra context for descriptive GeoQA. Evaluation results demonstrate that the system can generate answers with a high delivery rate and a high semantic accuracy. To make the framework accessible, we further developed a web application that supports interactive querying and visualization.