  Learning knowledge graph (KG) embeddings is an emerging technique for a
variety of downstream tasks such as summarization, link prediction, information
retrieval, and question answering. However, most existing KG embedding models
neglect space and, therefore, do not perform well when applied to (geo)spatial
data and tasks. For those models that consider space, most of them primarily
rely on some notions of distance. These models suffer from higher computational
complexity during training while still losing information beyond the relative
distance between entities. In this work, we propose a location-aware KG
embedding model called SE-KGE. It directly encodes spatial information such as
point coordinates or bounding boxes of geographic entities into the KG
embedding space. The resulting model is capable of handling different types of
spatial reasoning. We also construct a geographic knowledge graph as well as a
set of geographic query-answer pairs called DBGeo to evaluate the performance
of SE-KGE in comparison to multiple baselines. Evaluation results show that
SE-KGE outperforms these baselines on the DBGeo dataset for geographic logic
query answering task. This demonstrates the effectiveness of our
spatially-explicit model and the importance of considering the scale of
different geographic entities. Finally, we introduce a novel downstream task
called spatial semantic lifting which links an arbitrary location in the study
area to entities in the KG via some relations. Evaluation on DBGeo shows that
our model outperforms the baseline by a substantial margin.
