The Importance of Authoritative URI Design Schemes for Open Government Data

Abstract

A major challenge when working with open government data is managing, connecting, and understanding the links between references to entities found across multiple datasets when these datasets use different vocabularies to refer to identical entities (i.e.: one dataset may refer to Microsoft as "Microsoft", another may refer to the company by its SEC filing number as "0000789019", and a third may use its stock ticker "MSFT".) In this paper we propose a naming scheme based on Web URLs that enables unambiguous naming and linking of datasets and, more importantly, data elements, across the Web. We further describe our ongoing work to demonstrate the implementation and authoritative management of such schemes through a class of web service we refer to as the "instance hub".