Intro: CEDAR Identifiers and IRIs

In this advanced topic we cover everything you might want to know about the unique identifiers used in CEDAR. The first section provides an introduction to the CEDAR-specific terms and concepts used throughout the chapter. In the overview below we introduce you to a few key terms.

Introduction to IRIs, URLs, and similar identifiers

Most people are familiar with the term URL, for Uniform Resource Locator. These are the web page identifiers you put into the browser to arrive at a web page. Sometimes we would use the term URI, which referred to any Uniform Resource Identifier—some of them weren't URLs, but even the URLs did not strictly have to be resolvable and could be used as identifiers.

The URL has been replaced by a newer standard, called an IRI, for Internationalized Resource Identifier. These can contain international characters and often resolve to web pages (when they begin https://) but like URLs, they do not have to be resolvable to serve as a unique identifier.

Throughout our manual, we usually refer to our CEDAR identifiers as IRIs, and will typically use URL to refer to a web address you'd put in your browser. But it's useful to understand that all of the identifiers and locators we are referring to are both IRIs and URLs.