Uniform resource characteristics (URCs) were subject of an IETF working group around 1994/1995. The purpose of UCS was a metadata framework for World Wide Web resources that were identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). The working group never produced a final standard, but it influenced related technologies, such as Dublin Core and Resource Description Framework.
During the early to mid 1990s, basic Web technologies, such as URL and HTTP were still in their infancy. Naming documents for was “probably the most crucial aspect of design and standardization”[1]. In most discussion naming was partitioned into location (URL) and identification (URN) as independent applications of an URI. URC referred to a third identifier type that could be used to describe document characteristics or to any document with a standardized description of another document (metadata). In RFC 1737 an URC was defined as “a set of meta-level information about a resource. Some examples of such meta-information are: owner, encoding, access restrictions (perhaps for particular instances), cost.” [2]. A resolution mechanism that uses URC to map from URNs to URLs is described in RFC 2483.[3] However, URC was never really adopted in practice and the discussion shifted to related technologies such as Dublin Core and RDF.