Taxonomy-Driven Knowledge Graph Construction for Domain-Specific Scientific Applications

We present a taxonomy-driven framework for constructing domain-specific knowledge graphs (KGs) that integrates structured taxonomies, Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).Although we focus on climate science to illustrate its effectiveness, our approach can potentially be adapted for other specialized domains.Existing methods often neglect curated taxonomies-hierarchies of verified entities and relationships-and LLMs frequently struggle to extract KGs in specialized domains.Our approach addresses these gaps by anchoring extraction to expert-curated taxonomies, aligning entities and relations with domain semantics, and validating LLM outputs using RAG against the domain taxonomy.Through a climate science case study using our annotated dataset of 25 publications (1,705 entity-publication links, 3,618 expert-validated relationships), we demonstrate that taxonomy-guided LLM prompting combined with RAG-based validation reduces hallucinations by 23.3% while improving F1 scores by 13.9% compared to baselines without the proposed techniques.Our contributions include: 1) a generalizable methodology for taxonomy-aligned KG construction; 2) a reproducible annotation pipeline, 3) the first benchmark dataset for climate science information retrieval; and 4) empirical insights into combining structured taxonomies with LLMs for specialized domains.The dataset, including expert annotations and taxonomy-aligned outputs, is publicly available at https://github.