Towards meaningful URIs for linked sensor data

Sensor data is stored and published using OGC’s Observation & Measurement specifications as underlying data model. With the advent of volunteered geographic information and the Semantic Sensor Web, work on an ontological, i.e. conceptual, model gains importance within the Sensor Web Enablement community. In contrast to a data model, an ontological approach abstracts from implementation details by focusing on modeling the real world from the perspective of a particular domain or application and, hence, restricts the interpretation of the used terminology towards their intended meaning. The shift to linked sensor data, however, requires yet another perspective. Two challenges have to be addressed, (i) how to refer to changing and frequently updated data sets such as stored in Sensor Observation Services using Uniform Resource Identifiers, and (ii) how to establish meaningful links between those data sets, i.e., observations, sensors, features of interest, observed properties, and further participants in the measurement process. In this short paper we focus on the problem of assigning meaningful URIs.