This brief article introduces the terminology and issues surrounding URIs and their role on the Web. This includes some historical context of what URI originally meant, as well as the ways it is used now and the direction in which it seems to be evolving. A key point is made regarding the difference between resources and their representations.
URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/WhatAreURIs/
Keywords: HTTP URIs, HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX)
Author: Thompson, Henry
Date created: 2010-08-26 04:00:00.000
Language: http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/iso639-2/eng
Time required: P15M
Educational use: instruction
Educational audience: student
Interactivity type: expositive
- Knows Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP (1991+), as the basic technology for resolving hyperlinks and transferring data on the World Wide Web.
- Knows that anything can be named with Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), such as agents, places, events, artifacts, and concepts.
- Knows that Uniform Resource Identifiers, or URIs (1994), include Uniform Resource Locators (URLs, which locate web pages) as well as location-independent identifiers for physical, conceptual, or web r
- Understands that a "real-world" thing may need to be named with a URI distinct from the URI for information about that thing.