Exposing open street map in the linked data cloud

Nowadays, the pervasive and mobile nature of information paves the way to a new family of location-aware services and tools. Geographical data are gaining momentum and this reflects in the growing of dedicated datasets in the Linked Data (LD) cloud. The very last version of the LD cloud diagram shows Geonames competing with DBpedia not just in terms of amount of data but also with reference to the number of links coming from/going to other datasets. Among the different Web projects, one the most important players in the geoarena, is for sure Open Street Map (OSM). It exposes a huge amount of data which is continually updated in a crowdsourced fashion. In order to make all this knowledge available as Linked Data, we developed LOSM: a SPARQL endpoint able to query the data available in OSM by an on-line translation form SPARQL syntax to a sequence of calls to the OSM overpass API.