Jon Phipps's Library tagged URI →  View Popular

The Web is designed to support flexible exploration of information by
human users and by automated agents. For such exploration to be
productive, information published by many different sources and for a
variety of purposes must be comprehensible to a wide range of Web client
software, and to users of that software.

HTTP and other Web technologies can be used to deploy
resource representations that are self-describing:
information about the encodings used for each representation is provided explicitly
within the representation.
Starting
with a URI, there is a standard algorithm that a user agent can apply to
retrieve and interpret such representations.
Furthermore, representations can be what we refer to as grounded
in the Web, by ensuring that specifications required to
interpret them are determined unambiguously based on the URI, and that explicit
references connect the pertinent specifications to each other.
Web-grounding ensures that the specifications needed
to interpret information on the Web can be identified unambiguously.
When such
self-describing, Web-grounded resources are linked together,
the Web as a whole can support reliable,
ad hoc discovery of information.

This finding describes how document
formats, markup conventions, attribute values, and other data formats
can be designed to facilitate the deployment of self-describing,
Web-grounded Web content.

This document defines two namespaces of URNs, based on using a
timestamp with an (encoded) URI. The results are namespaces in which names
are readily assigned, offer the persistence of reference that is
required by URNs, but do not require a stable authority to assign
the name. The first namespace ("duri") is used to refer to
URI-identified resources as they appeared at a particular time. The
second namespace ("tdb") is useful as a way of creating URNs that
refer to physical objects or even abstractions that are not
themselves networked resources.

The definition of these namespaces may reduce the need to define new
URN namespaces merely for the purpose of creating stable
identifiers.