PRE_PUBLICATION DRAFT --- DO NOT CITE The Importance of Authoritative URI Design Schemes for Open Government Data Alexei Bulazel, Dominic DiFranzo, John S. Erickson, James A. Hendler Tetherless World Constellation, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY {bulaza, difrad, erickj4, hendlj2}@rpi.edu 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 (ie: 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”. When working with linked government data, provided either directly from governments via open government programs or through other sources, the issue of resolving inconsistencies in naming schemes is particularly important, as various agencies have disparate conventions for referring to the same concepts and entities. Using linked data technologies we have created instance hubs to assist in the management and linking of entity references for collections of categorically and hierarchically related entities. Instance hubs are of particular interest to governments engaged in the publication of linked open government data, as they can help data consumers make better sense of published data and can provide a starting point for development of linked data applications.