(Uniform Resource Identifier) The addressing technology for identifying resources on the Internet or private intranet. URIs were originally defined as two types: Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) which are addresses with network locations, and Uniform Resource Names (URNs), which are persistent names that are address independent.
The terms URI and URL are used synonymously, but URL is more widely used in everyday conversation. In technical documentation from the standards committees, URI is the preferred term and may be used with the application-level protocol (URI scheme) such as HTTP to be more specific. Thus, an "HTTP URI" is a URL used to access a Web server. See
URL,
URN and
URI scheme.
