Geospatial Knowledge Graphs (GeoKGs) model geoentities (e.g., places and natural features) and spatial relationships in an interconnected manner, providing strong knowledge support for geographic applications, including data retrieval, question-answering, and spatial reasoning. However, existing methods for mining and reasoning from GeoKGs, such as popular knowledge graph embedding (KGE) techniques, lack geographic awareness. This study aims to enhance general-purpose KGE by developing new strategies and integrating geometric features of spatial relations, including topology, direction, and distance, to infuse the embedding process with geographic intuition. The new model is tested on downstream link prediction tasks, and the results show that the inclusion of geometric features, particularly topology and direction, improves prediction accuracy for both geoentities and spatial relations. Our research offers new perspectives for integrating spatial concepts and principles into the GeoKG mining process, providing customized GeoAI solutions for geospatial challenges.

As an important part of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Question Answering (QA) aims at generating answers to questions phrased in natural language. While there has been substantial progress in open-domain question answering, QA systems are still struggling to answer questions which involve geographic entities or concepts and that require spatial operations. In this paper, we discuss the problem of geographic question answering (GeoQA). We first investigate the reasons why geographic questions are difficult to answer by analyzing challenges of geographic questions. We discuss the uniqueness of geographic questions compared to general QA. Then we review existing work on GeoQA and classify them by the types of questions they can address. Based on this survey, we provide a generic classification framework for geographic questions. Finally, we conclude our work by pointing out unique future research directions for GeoQA.