Iterative Geographic Entity Alignment with Cross-Attention

Aligning schemas and entities of community-created geographic data sources with ontologies and knowledge graphs is a promising research direction for making this data widely accessible and reusable for semantic applications. However, such alignment is challenging due to the substantial differences in entity representations and sparse inter-linking across sources, as well as high heterogeneity of schema elements and sparse entity annotations in community-created geographic data. To address these challenges, we propose a novel cross-attention-based iterative alignment approach called IGEA in this paper. IGEA adopts cross-attention to align heterogeneous context representations across geographic data sources and knowledge graphs. Moreover, IGEA employs an iterative approach for schema and entity alignment to overcome annotation and interlinking sparsity. Experiments on real-world datasets from several countries demonstrate that our proposed approach increases entity alignment performance compared to baseline methods by up to 18% points in F1-score. IGEA increases the performance of the entity and tag-to-class alignment by 7 and 8% points in terms of F1-score, respectively, by employing the iterative method.