Linked Timelines: Time Representation and Management in Linked Data Gianluca Correndo, Manuel Salvadores, Ian Millard, and Nigel Shadbolt Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK. {gc3,ms8,icm,nrs}@ecs.soton.ac.uk http://ecs.soton.ac.uk/ Abstract. This paper addresses the issue of representing time entities (i.e. instants and intervals) as Linked Data, and how to exploit topolog- ical temporal relationships in order to increase the connectivity degree within Linked Data sets. The capability to describe and efficiently man- age temporal information in knowledge management systems is of pri- mary importance. Information is in fact volatile, dependant to a number of contexts for its interpretation, among them ”time” deserves partic- ular attention. Many data sets contain information that are valid only within a given time frame (e.g. roles covered by different people in dif- ferent times), whereas others describe temporal events. In this paper we present an approach to describe temporal entities as reusable URIs that can be adopted by data publishers as a temporal context to their in- formation resources. The approach identifies a set of discrete temporal entities as relevant for a certain domain (e.g. financial years for the public sector) while a RESTful API is provided to users to dynamically create their own temporal entities. Once a dynamic temporal URI is resolved, information are provided to situate such URI in reference to the domain relevant entities. The URI resolution employs simple topological tempo- ral reasoning in order to exploit the qualitative relationships between entities. We also provide a usage scenario of such approach based on a backlinking service and Public Sector Information published in Linked Data format within the EnAKTing project. Keywords: Linked Data, time, reasoning 1 Introduction The Linked Data initiative represents the first collaborative effort to create a Web of Data (WoD henceforth) of considerable scale, providing few, simple guidelines for publishing content using well established standards [4]. Such guidelines and standards are leading the way to a new paradigm of interaction between govern- ment and citizens in the UK and around the world. In order to pursue better access for citizens to information held by local as well as national public organisa- tions, the UK government has launched a public initiative for publishing Public Sector Information (PSI), adopting Linked Data tenets as future best practices.