erational semantics] General Terms Theory, Experimentation

Place-based GIS are still a novel research topic and break with some traditions of established systems. The typical spatial perspective is based on geometric reference systems that include coordinates, distances, topology, and directions; while the alternative platial perspective is usually charac-terized by place names and descriptions as well as seman-tic relationships between places. In past decades, space-based geographic information systems have made significant progress in terms of theories, models, functionalities, and applications. In contrast, place-based GIS are not yet well developed, although there is an increasing interest in pla-tial and especially relational approaches. In this paper we take an example-driven, first step towards introducing place-based versions of the well known spatial join and buffer op-erations, and apply them to deal with place-based semantic compression and expansion in DBpedia