IETF The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster or requirements and a ...

specifications, a Uniform Resource Characteristic (URC) is a

string String or strings may refer to: *String (structure), a long flexible structure made from threads twisted together, which is used to tie, bind, or hang other objects Arts, entertainment, and media Films * ''Strings'' (1991 film), a Canadian anim ...

character Character or Characters may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Literature * ''Character'' (novel), a 1936 Dutch novel by Ferdinand Bordewijk * ''Characters'' (Theophrastus), a classical Greek set of character sketches attributed to The ...

s representing the

metadata Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...

of a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), a string identifying a Web resource. URC metadata was envisioned to include sufficient information to support

persistent identifiers A persistent identifier (PI or PID) is a long-lasting reference to a document, file, web page, or other object. The term "persistent identifier" is usually used in the context of digital objects that are accessible over the Internet. Typically, s ...

, such as mapping a Uniform Resource Name (URN) to a current Uniform Resource Locator (URL). URCs were proposed as a specification in the mid-1990s, but were never adopted. The use of a URC would allow the location of a Web resource to be obtained from its standard name, via the use of a resolving service. It was also to be possible to obtain a URC from a URN by the use of a resolving service. The design goals of URCs were that they should be simple to use, easy to extend, and compatible with a wide range of technological systems. The URC syntax was intended to be easily understood by both humans and software.

History

The term "URC" was first coined as Uniform Resource Citation in 1992 by

John Kunze John is a common English name and surname: * John (given name) * John (surname) John may also refer to: New Testament Works * Gospel of John, a title often shortened to John * First Epistle of John, often shortened to 1 John * Second ...

within the IETF URI working group as a small package of metadata elements (which became the ERC) to accompany a

hypertext Hypertext is E-text, text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typi ...

link and meant to help users decide if the link might be interesting. The working group later changed the acronym expansion to Uniform Resource Characteristic, intended to provide a standardized representation of document properties, such as owner, encoding, access restrictions or cost. The group discussed URCs around 1994/1995, but it never produced a final standard and URCs were never widely adopted in practice. Even so, the concepts on which URCs were based influenced subsequent technologies such as the Dublin Core and

Resource Description Framework The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard originally designed as a data model for metadata. It has come to be used as a general method for description and exchange of graph data. RDF provides a variety of ...

References

External links

IETF URC working group charter
* * {{cite web, first=Roy, last=Fielding, authorlink=Roy Fielding, title=How Roy would Implement URNs and URCs Today, publisher=

, date=7 July 1995, url=//tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-uri-roy-urn-urc-00.txt History of the Internet Technical specifications URI schemes