The Resource Description Framework RDF allows you to describe web documents and resources from the real world—people, organisations, things—in a computer-processable way. Publishing such descriptions on the web creates the semantic web. URIs are very important as the link between RDF and the web. This article presents guidelines for their effective use.
The idea of markup languages was apparently first publicly presented by the engineer William W. Tunnicliffe (1922-1996) from Washington, D.C. In September of 1967, during a meeting at the Canadian Government Printing Office, Tunnicliffe gave a presentation on the separation of information content of documents from their format.
PURLs (Persistent Uniform Resource Locators) are Web addresses that act as permanent identifiers in the face of a dynamic and changing Web infrastructure.
In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal for an information management system to his boss, Mike Sendall. ‘Vague, but exciting’, were the words that Sendall wrote on the proposal, allowing Berners-Lee to continue.
[VORLESUNG: ...just for info, not mandatory]
Ian Horrocks, Peter F. Patel-Schneider, and Frank van Harmelen. From SHIQ and RDF to OWL: The Making of a Web Ontology Language. J. of Web Semantics, 1(1):7-26, 2003.