  Many place-related questions can only be answered by complex spatial
reasoning, a task poorly supported by factoid question retrieval. Such
reasoning using combinations of spatial and non-spatial criteria pertinent to
place-related questions is increasingly possible on linked data knowledge
bases. Yet, to enable question answering based on linked knowledge bases,
natural language questions must first be re-formulated as formal queries. Here,
we first present an enhanced version of YAGO2geo, the geospatially-enabled
variant of the YAGO2 knowledge base, by linking and adding more than one
million places from OpenStreetMap data to YAGO2. We then propose a novel
approach to translate the place-related questions into logical representations,
theoretically grounded in the core concepts of spatial information. Next, we
use a dynamic template-based approach to generate fully executable GeoSPARQL
queries from the logical representations. We test our approach using the
Geospatial Gold Standard dataset and report substantial improvements over
existing methods.
