Overview
A uniform resource identifier (URI) is a unique sequence of characters for identifying some physical or abstract resource. URIs are further generalized to internationalized resource identifiers (IRIs) which allow using characters from any language, provided there exists a standard web encoding of the characters.
The URI generic syntax consists of five components organized hierarchically in order of decreasing significance from left to right:
<scheme>:[//<authority>]<path>[?<query>][#<fragment>]
where the <authority> is further composed as
[<userinfo>@]<host>[:<port>]
URLs
A uniform resource locator (URL) is a URI that specifies the means of finding the represented resource. The most commonly used schemes are http and https.
URNs
A uniform resource name (URN) is a URI that uses the urn scheme. It is intended to uniquely identify a resource, even when the resource no longer exists.
CURIEs
A compact URI (CURIE) is a denser representation of URIs. In its simplest form, it consists of a namespace and identifier separated by a colon. For example, geo:England.
Bibliography
- Allemang, Dean, James A. Hendler, and Fabien L. Gandon. Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist. 3e ed. ACM Books 33. New York: Association for computing machinery, 2020.
- “Uniform Resource Identifier.” In Wikipedia, July 22, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Uniform_Resource_Identifier.
- “Uniform Resource Locator.” In Wikipedia, June 20, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=URL.
- “Uniform Resource Name.” In Wikipedia, April 26, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Uniform_Resource_Name.