Uniform resource characteristics (URCs) were subject of an IETF

Internet Engineering Task Force

The Internet Engineering Task Force develops and promotes Internet standards, cooperating closely with the W3C and ISO/IEC standards bodies and dealing in particular with standards of the TCP/IP and Internet protocol suite...

 working group around 1994/1995. The purpose of UCS was a metadata

Metadata

The term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts . Although the expression "data about data" is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at...

 framework for World Wide Web

World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...

 resources that were identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier

Uniform Resource Identifier

In computing, a uniform resource identifier is a string of characters used to identify a name or a resource on the Internet. Such identification enables interaction with representations of the resource over a network using specific protocols...

 (URI). The working group never produced a final standard, but it influenced related technologies, such as Dublin Core

Dublin Core

The Dublin Core metadata terms are a set of vocabulary terms which can be used to describe resources for the purposes of discovery. The terms can be used to describe a full range of web resources: video, images, web pages etc and physical resources such as books and objects like artworks...

 and Resource Description Framework

Resource Description Framework

The Resource Description Framework is a family of World Wide Web Consortium specifications originally designed as a metadata data model...

.

During the early to mid 1990s, basic Web technologies, such as URL and HTTP were still in their infancy. Naming documents for was “probably the most crucial aspect of design and standardization”. In most discussion naming was partitioned into location (URL) and identification (URN) as independent applications of an URI. URC referred to a third identifier type that could be used to describe document characteristics or to any document with a standardized description of another document (metadata). In RFC 1737 an URC was defined as “a set of meta-level information about a resource. Some examples of such meta-information are: owner, encoding, access restrictions (perhaps for particular instances), cost.” . A resolution mechanism that uses URC to map from URNs to URLs is described in RFC 2483. However, URC was never really adopted in practice and the discussion shifted to related technologies such as Dublin Core and RDF.

Working group documents

• IETF WG-URC charter
• Michael Mealling
  Michael Mealling
  Michael Mealling is currently the Chief Financial Officer and Vice President of Business Development of Masten Space Systems, CEO of , long time participant within the IETF, a Space Frontier Foundation Advocate, and a former Director of the Moon Society...
  
  : Specification of Uniform Resource Characteristics, 12 April 1994, <draft-ietf-uri-urc-00.txt>
• Mitra: URN to URC resolution scenario, 14 April 1994, <draft-ietf-uri-urn2urc-00.txt>
• Michael Mealling: Encoding and Use of Uniform Resource Characteristics. 6 July 1994,
• Ron Daniel, Michael Mealling: URC Scenarios and Requirements, 27 March 1995, <draft-ietf-uri-urc-req-01.txt>
• Paul E. Hoffman, Ron Daniel: Trivial URC Syntax: urc0., 21 April 1995, <draft-ietf-uri-urc-trivial-00.txt>
• Ron Daniel, Terry Allen: An SGML-based URC Service, 16 June 1995, <draft-ietf-uri-urc-sgml-00.txt>
• Roy Fielding
  Roy Fielding
  Roy Thomas Fielding is an American computer scientist, one of the principal authors of the HTTP specification, an authority on computer network architecture and co-founder of the Apache HTTP Server project....
  
  : How Roy would Implement URNs and URCs Today, 7 July 1995, <draft-ietf-uri-roy-urn-urc-00.txt>