Member Submission - Note

Date: Feb. 15, 2001
Link: http://www.w3.org/TR/urispace
Source Author or Organization: Akamai Technologies

This submission from Akamai Technologies proposes a mechanism for assigning metadata to resources, or across groups of resources, based upon their Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) namespaces, in order to address an increasing need to manage metadata about resources.

In the URISpace Model, an application can assign metadata to an entity based upon its URI namespace by building a tree of selectors that contains the metadata and describes the Uniform Resource Identifier namespace. This document describes the elements, describes tree structure and usage, shows how metadata may be represented, and defines ways to extend its functionality.

A foundation for processing such metadata may be found in XML using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) as a serialization syntax. This framework trys to avoid some of the shortcomings of existing solutions such as the prefix conventions used in the robots.txt mechanism and some Web server configuration files. Major design goals for URISpace include a format that allows flexible selection that can be used for a wide variety of existing and future applications, is extensible, easy for users to understand and that employs an efficient URI namespace description.