LauNuts: A Knowledge Graph to Identify and Compare Geographic Regions in the European Union

Abstract

The Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) is a classification that represents countries in the European Union (EU). It is published at intervals of several years and organized in a hierarchical system where geographical areas are subdivided according to their population sizes. In addition to NUTS, there is a further subdivided hierarchy level, named Local Administrative Units (LAU), whose data are updated annually by EU member states. While both datasets are published by Eurostat as Excel files, an additional RDF dataset is available for NUTS up to the 2016 scheme. With this work, we provide the Linked Data community with an up-to-date Knowledge Graph in which NUTS and LAU data are linked and which contains population numbers as well as area sizes. We also publish an Open Source generator software for future released versions that will naturally arise due to changes in population numbers. These contributions can be used to enrich other datasets and allow comparisons among regions in the European Union. All resources are available at https://w3id.org/launuts .