Enriching city entities in the EKOSS failure cases knowledge base with Linked Open Data

Repositories of semantic statements that are created manually can contain detailed domain-specific knowledge with “heavy-weight” semantics that support intelligent computer processing services. However, such repositories often lack common knowledge since the authors of semantic statements often leave out details that human readers would already know. Some of this common knowledge can be encoded in ontologies that provide computers with background facts for a particular domain. However, the scalability of this approach is limited. We describe a stepwise procedure to enrich a repository of user contributed semantic statements with a set of standard entity statements that provide information about commonly known entities in the domain. We apply the procedure to extract common knowledge about city entities from Linked Open Data sources into standard entity statements that we use to enrich the semantic statements in the EKOSS failure cases knowledge base, which contains knowledge about failures in engineering. We then present a qualitative evaluation through a scenario, which demonstrates that using this simple procedure to enrich domain-specific semantic statements with common knowledge makes it possible to answer interesting search queries that would otherwise not get any results.