Building geospatial knowledge graphs for cultural heritage with the GeoLinks API

The Cultural Heritage domain is rich in contextual information, often found in unstructured texts. These sources frequently reference places but typically lack the semantic structure required for geospatial integration and analysis. We introduce the GeoLinks API, a lightweight web service that extracts and links geospatial entities from narrative texts to support the automatic construction of structured geospatial knowledge graphs. The API performs two core functions: (i) extracting geometries from GeoNames IRIs, and (ii) recognising and linking place entities to Wikidata. Outputs are expressed in GeoSPARQL, enabling spatial reasoning, semantic interoperability, and integration with Linked Data infrastructures. We demonstrate the performance of the GeoLinks API on a dataset of contextual narratives related to traditional craft production, illustrating how it transforms unstructured cultural texts into machine-readable, semantically enriched geospatial knowledge. This approach advances Cultural Heritage preservation and research by making spatial context explicit and supporting new forms of digital analysis.