Applying Design Patterns in URI Strategies -- Naming in Linked Geospatial Data Infrastructure

The centrality of Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) as names in Linked Data initiatives has led to the development of guidelines and best practices by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and other experts groups on how to design "good" URIs in general and for the government domain in particular. However, these URI design guidelines have had limited pragmatic value for several reasons including the under specified nature of the rules, weak elaboration on nature of problems addressed and consequences of prescribed design decisions. With no conceptual or rigorous underpinning for existing design rules, checking for internal consistency or coverage when developing URI strategies is difficult. We tackle these problems in this paper by: 1) consolidating existing URI design rules, 2) distilling core URI design aspects or facets from these rules and 3) abstracting the rules into a set of consistent URI Design Patterns specifications. This process resulted in 8 Design Patterns from an initial set of 37 URI design rules. Following this, we show how the design patterns could be employed in developing a URI strategy to support the realization of a Linked Spatial Data Infrastructure. We conclude with an evaluation of the URI design patterns and implications of our work.