In computing, info is a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) scheme which enables identifiers from public namespaces to be represented as URIs, when they would otherwise have no canonical URL form, such as Library of Congress identifiers, Handle System handles, and Digital object identifiers.
The specification for the info scheme is provided by the Informational RFC 4452. [1]
The following is an example of an info URI:
info:ddc/22/eng//004.678
In this example, "ddc" designates the Dewey Decimal Classification namespace and "22/eng//004.678" is the identifier within that namespace.
Between 2003 and 2010, info namespaces were registered by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) Office of Research on behalf of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), an American library standards body. About 30 namespaces were registered. [2]
In 2010, the registry was closed, in view of the increasing importance of the W3C Linked Data paradigm, and adopters of the info scheme were advised to migrate resource identity requirements towards "mainstream Web practices." [3]
The Dublin Core, also known as the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, is a set of fifteen "core" elements (properties) for describing resources. This fifteen-element Dublin Core has been formally standardized as ISO 15836, ANSI/NISO Z39.85, and IETF RFC 5013. The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI), which formulates the Dublin Core, is a project of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), a non-profit organization. The core properties are part of a larger set of DCMI Metadata Terms. "Dublin Core" is also used as an adjective for Dublin Core metadata, a style of metadata that draws on multiple Resource Description Framework (RDF) vocabularies, packaged and constrained in Dublin Core application profiles.
A Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) is a unique sequence of characters that identifies a logical or physical resource used by web technologies. URIs may be used to identify anything, including real-world objects, such as people and places, concepts, or information resources such as web pages and books. Some URIs provide a means of locating and retrieving information resources on a network ; these are Uniform Resource Locators (URLs). A URL provides the location of the resource. A URI identifies the resource by name at the specified location or URL. Other URIs provide only a unique name, without a means of locating or retrieving the resource or information about it, these are Uniform Resource Names (URNs). The web technologies that use URIs are not limited to web browsers. URIs are used to identify anything described using the Resource Description Framework (RDF), for example, concepts that are part of an ontology defined using the Web Ontology Language (OWL), and people who are described using the Friend of a Friend vocabulary would each have an individual URI.
An identifier is a name that identifies either a unique object or a unique class of objects, where the "object" or class may be an idea, physical countable object, or physical noncountable substance. The abbreviation ID often refers to identity, identification, or an identifier. An identifier may be a word, number, letter, symbol, or any combination of those.
A Uniform Resource Name (URN) is a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) that uses the urn
scheme. URNs are globally unique persistent identifiers assigned within defined namespaces so they will be available for a long period of time, even after the resource which they identify ceases to exist or becomes unavailable. URNs cannot be used to directly locate an item and need not be resolvable, as they are simply templates that another parser may use to find an item.
In computing, a directory service or name service maps the names of network resources to their respective network addresses. It is a shared information infrastructure for locating, managing, administering and organizing everyday items and network resources, which can include volumes, folders, files, printers, users, groups, devices, telephone numbers and other objects. A directory service is a critical component of a network operating system. A directory server or name server is a server which provides such a service. Each resource on the network is considered an object by the directory server. Information about a particular resource is stored as a collection of attributes associated with that resource or object.
A digital object identifier (DOI) is a persistent identifier or handle used to identify objects uniquely, standardized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). An implementation of the Handle System, DOIs are in wide use mainly to identify academic, professional, and government information, such as journal articles, research reports, data sets, and official publications. DOIs have also been used, however, to identify other types of information resources, such as commercial videos.
XML Signature defines an XML syntax for digital signatures and is defined in the W3C recommendation XML Signature Syntax and Processing. Functionally, it has much in common with PKCS #7 but is more extensible and geared towards signing XML documents. It is used by various Web technologies such as SOAP, SAML, and others.
Representational state transfer (REST) is a software architectural style that was created to guide the design and development of the architecture for the World Wide Web. REST defines a set of constraints for how the architecture of an Internet-scale distributed hypermedia system, such as the Web, should behave. The REST architectural style emphasises the scalability of interactions between components, uniform interfaces, independent deployment of components, and the creation of a layered architecture to facilitate caching components to reduce user-perceived latency, enforce security, and encapsulate legacy systems.
The Internationalized Resource Identifier (IRI) is an internet protocol standard which builds on the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) protocol by greatly expanding the set of permitted characters. It was defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in 2005 in RFC 3987. While URIs are limited to a subset of the US-ASCII character set, IRIs may additionally contain most characters from the Universal Character Set, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Cyrillic characters.
A persistent uniform resource locator (PURL) is a uniform resource locator (URL) that is used to redirect to the location of the requested web resource. PURLs redirect HTTP clients using HTTP status codes.
XML namespaces are used for providing uniquely named elements and attributes in an XML document. They are defined in a W3C recommendation. An XML instance may contain element or attribute names from more than one XML vocabulary. If each vocabulary is given a namespace, the ambiguity between identically named elements or attributes can be resolved.
Life Science Identifiers are a way to name and locate pieces of information on the web. Essentially, an LSID is a unique identifier for some data, and the LSID protocol specifies a standard way to locate the data. They are a little like DOIs used by many publishers.
PRONOM is a web-based technical registry to support digital preservation services, developed by The National Archives of the United Kingdom. PRONOM was the first and remains, to date, the only operational public file format registry in the world, although the "Magic File" repository of the File Command has served this role in a less formal capacity for two decades. Other projects to develop technical registries, including the UK Digital Curation Centre's Representation Information Registry, and the Global Digital Format Registry project at Harvard University, are now in progress.
Michael Mealling is co-founder of Pipefish Inc, and was the cofounder, Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and Vice President of Business Development of Masten Space Systems, CEO of Refactored Networks, long time participant within the IETF, a Space Frontier Foundation Advocate, and a former Director of the Moon Society. He operates a blog site called Rocketforge and has been interviewed twice on The Space Show and twice on SpaceVidcast.
A Formal Public Identifier (FPI) is a short piece of specially formatted text that may be used to uniquely identify a product, specification or document. One of their most common uses is as part of document type definitions, but they are also used in the vCard and iCalendar formats to identify the software product that has generated data.
The Handle System is the Corporation for National Research Initiatives's proprietary registry assigning persistent identifiers, or handles, to information resources, and for resolving "those handles into the information necessary to locate, access, and otherwise make use of the resources".
An Archival Resource Key (ARK) is a multi-purpose URL suited to being a persistent identifier for information objects of any type. It is widely used by libraries, data centers, archives, museums, publishers, and government agencies to provide reliable references to scholarly, scientific, and cultural objects. In 2019 it was registered as a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI).
An Extensible Resource Identifier is a scheme and resolution protocol for abstract identifiers compatible with Uniform Resource Identifiers and Internationalized Resource Identifiers, developed by the XRI Technical Committee at OASIS. The goal of XRI was a standard syntax and discovery format for abstract, structured identifiers that are domain-, location-, application-, and transport-independent, so they can be shared across any number of domains, directories, and interaction protocols.
The MIRIAM Registry, a by-product of the MIRIAM Guidelines, is a database of namespaces and associated information that is used in the creation of uniform resource identifiers. It contains the set of community-approved namespaces for databases and resources serving, primarily, the biological sciences domain. These shared namespaces, when combined with 'data collection' identifiers, can be used to create globally unique identifiers for knowledge held in data repositories. For more information on the use of URIs to annotate models, see the specification of SBML Level 2 Version 2.
A Uniform Resource Locator (URL), colloquially termed a web address, is a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), although many people use the two terms interchangeably. URLs occur most commonly to reference web pages (http) but are also used for file transfer (ftp), email (mailto), database access (JDBC), and many other applications.