The objects on the network which
are to be named and addressed include
typically objects which can be retrieved,
and objects which can be searched.
There is a great variety of other
objects which may support other operations.
We imply nothing about the contents
of objects in this document. Whereas
human-readable documents are currently
the center of interest of the field,
we envisage all aspects discussed
in this paper applying to generalized
objects when systems to handle them
become available. The "object" is
the unit of reference and need not
correspond to any unit of storage.
We refer to objects which can be
searched as "indexes". We emphasize
that this is the abstract view of
the client, and these objects need
not correspond to physical files
on computers. We refer to the person
who does the retrieval or searching
as the user.
Within this document, we use the
terms "name" very generally for a
string of characters describing an
object, whatever its combination
of properties mentioned below. (The
term usually has a narrower meaning
but we needed some term for the universal
set.). This uniform syntax applied
to a generic name is known as a Uniform
Resource Identifier (URI). The term
"address" is reserved for an string
which specifies a more or less physical
location. The term "locator" refers
to a URL as here defined. URIs which
have a greater persistence than URLs
are referred to as URNs.