Turning GeoNames into linked data
A while ago we added worldwide GeoNames to the Network of Terms. That post announced the what; this one is the how, because getting GeoNames in there was less obvious than it sounds.
GeoNames has no usable RDF. There is official ‘RDF’, but it dates from 2020, it is broken RDF/XML and incomplete anyway. There’s also per-resource RDF, but that’s hard to work with for 13M+ resources. So we fell back to the TSV dump: messy, but recent and complete. This is the story of converting that TSV to RDF using nothing but the SPARQL we already know: no bespoke scripts, no separate mapping language. And of why the pipeline around the conversion is what turns a one-off experiment into an actual service.