First public release of the USGIN URI Policies document.

This document presents a proposal for minting of dereferenceable http URIs for use in interoperable web ser-vices. The design approach is to explicitly distinguish the dereferencing host from the name authority, recognizing that these may be decoupled. Content negotiation and url redirection that are invisible to the user violate the requirement for URI transparency. One of the objectives of this URI scheme is to define a syntax that makes clear the distinction between an identifier for a non-information resource, information resource and specific representation resource to address the issues raised by Booth (2003-01-28). Another important design criterion is that the http URIs should be dereferenceable using standard web server resource path conventions on any commonly used operating system, in order to make implementation of dereferencing as simple as possible. The ABNF syntax can be summarized as:

ginURI = "http:" "//" uriHost “/” URIscheme “/” nameAuthority “/”
  resourcePath  [“/” resourceSpecificString] [( “/” / “/” representationPart )]