Linked Timelines: Temporal Representation and Management in Linked Data

This paper addresses the issue of representing time entities (i.e. instants and intervals) as Linked Data, and how to exploit topological temporal relationships in order to increase the connectivity degree within Linked Data sets. Describing and efficiently managing temporal information in knowledge management systems is important. Information is volatile, dependant on a number of contexts for its interpretation, among them “time”. Many data sets contain information that is valid only within a given time frame (e.g. roles fulfilled by different people at different 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 for their information 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 is provided to situate such URI in reference to the domain relevant entities. The URI resolution employs simple topological temporal reasoning in order to exploit the qualitative relationships between entities. We also provide a usage scenario of our approach based on a backlinking service and using Public Sector Information published in Linked Data format within the EnAKTing project.