URI-s Play a Fundamental Role

You can uniquely identify all resources on the web
Uniqueness is vital to make consistent statements
Anybody can create metadata on any resource on the Web
- eg, the same SVG file could be annotated through other terms
It becomes easy to merge metadata
- applications may merge the SVG annotations coming from different sources
- this can be done because they refer to the same URI-s!
Watch out for upcoming IRI-s in internationalization, too!

Ivan Herman, W3C Head of Offices

Beijing, China, 12 November, 2003

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