Abstract

Complex data domains increase the difficulty of structuring, sharing, discovering and governing information. For the geospatial domain common models such as INSPIRE have been established in the European Union. The United Nations initiative on Global Geospatial Information Management (UN-GGIM) draws together national and regional capacities. Interoperability is the main principle behind these initiatives. Nonetheless there is a lack of published research to date on mapping agency geospatial linked data leveraging the UN-GGIM taxonomy of information management data themes. Thus, we have identified use cases and defined a Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS)\footnote{\url{https://www.w3.org/TR/skos-reference/}} taxonomy expressing the UN GGIM data themes for national spatial infrastructure. This has been applied in a metadata generation and reporting tool for Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSi) which underpinned improved governance and reporting infrastructure in OSi. This demonstrated the contribution of Semantic Web technology to spatial data governance as well as its importance for data publishing. This paper presents a documented open license SKOS taxonomy for the UN GGIM data themes that follows Linked Data best practices. It provides a set of three use cases, an overview of UN-GGIM theme definitions and an example application of the taxonomy for deployment in OSi for DCAT metadata generation and data publishing pipeline reporting.