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

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 ...

of characters representing the

metadata Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * 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 A specification often refers to a set of documented requirements to be satisfied by a material, design, product, or service. A specification is often a type of technical standard. There are different types of technical or engineering specificati ...

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 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 typic ...

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 140px, Logo of DCMI, maintenance agency for Dublin Core Terms The Dublin Core vocabulary, also known as the Dublin Core Metadata Terms (DCMT), is a general purpose metadata vocabulary for describing resources of any type. It was first developed ...

and

Resource Description Framework The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a method to describe and exchange graph data. It was originally designed as a data model for metadata by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It provides a variety of syntax notations and formats, of whi ...

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=https://www.w3.org/People/Fielding/draft-ietf-uri-roy-urn-urc-00.txt History of the Internet Technical specifications URI schemes