A dereferenceable Uniform Resource Identifier or dereferenceable URI is a resource retrieval mechanism that uses any of the internet protocols (e.g. HTTP) to obtain a copy or representation of the resource it identifies.
In the context of traditional HTML web pages, this is the normal and obvious way of working: A URI refers to the page, and when requested the web server returns a copy of it. In other non-dereferenceable contexts, such as XML Schema, the namespace identifier is still a URI, but this is simply an identifier (i.e. a namespace name). There is no intention that this can or should be dereferenced. There is even a separate attribute, schemaLocation, which may contain a dereferenceable URI that does point to a copy of the schema document.
In the case of Linked Data, the representation takes the form of a document (typically HTML or XML) that describes the resource that the URI identifies. In either case, the mechanism makes it possible for a user (or software agent) to "follow your nose" to find out more information related to the identified resource.
Read more about Dereferenceable Uniform Resource Identifier: Background, Formats, Summary
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