Universal Resource Identifiers

= provides permanent addresses for data elements

Description

Joe Geldart:

"Both the Document Web and the Data Web rely upon a very simple idea; that of providing names to things. In the Document Web, these names are locators; they tell you where to find documents so that you can download them. Appropriately, these names are called Universal Resource Locators (URLs). The Data Web goes a step further and provides the ability to name things you can't download such as the book you just read, the idea you just had and the action you're about to do. These names are called Universal Resource Identifiers (URIs) and subsume URLs." (http://www.dur.ac.uk/j.r.c.geldart/essays/there_again/towards_the_active_web.html)