Uniform Resource Identifier: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 09:24, 6 August 2025

Revision as of 22:13, 7 August 2025

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| website = https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3986#section-1.1

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A '''Uniform Resource Identifier''' ('''<code>URI'''</code>), formerly '''Universal Resource Identifier''', is a unique sequence of characters that identifies an abstract or physical resource,{{Sfn|Berners-Lee, Tim; Fielding, Roy T.; Masinter, Larry|2005|p=1|ps=, "Abstract"}} such as resources on a webpage, mail address, phone number,{{Sfn|Berners-Lee, Tim; Fielding, Roy T.; Masinter, Larry|2005|p=7|ps=; "1.1.2. Examples", "1.1.3. URI, URL, and URN"}} books, real-world objects such as people and places, concepts.{{Sfn|Berners-Lee, Tim; Fielding, Roy T.; Masinter, Larry|2005|p=5|ps=, "Resource: the term "resource" is used in a general sense for whatever might be identified by a URI"}} URIs are used to identify anything described using the [[Resource Description Framework]] (RDF), for example, concepts that are part of an [[Ontology (information science)|ontology]] defined using the [[Web Ontology Language]] (OWL), and people who are described using the [[FOAF (ontology)|Friend of a Friend vocabulary]] would each have an individual URI.

URIs which provide a means of locating and [[Information retrieval|retrieving]] information resources on a network (either on the Internet or on another private network, such as a computer filesystem or an [[Intranet]]) are [[Uniform Resource Locator]]s (URLs). Therefore, URLs are a subset of URIs, i.e. every URL is a URI (and not necessarily the other way around).{{Sfn|Berners-Lee, Tim; Fielding, Roy T.; Masinter, Larry|2005|p=7|ps=; "1.1.2. Examples", "1.1.3. URI, URL, and URN"}} Other URIs provide only a unique name, without a means of locating or retrieving the resource or information about it; these are [[Uniform Resource Name]]s (URNs). The web technologies that use URIs are not limited to [[Web browser|web browsers]].