What is a URI?

It stands for 'Universal Resource Identifier', and it is a unique address for a documentation record that we want others to refer to. The concept of ‘paper’, as defined in the Getty Arts & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), can be referenced by the URI: ‘http://vocab.getty.edu/aat/300014109’. One of the benefit of using URIs is machine disambiguation. I.e. it is clear to a machine where to point users when a record refer to ‘paper’ according to the Getty AAT definition. Also, a URI can be matched with other words for 'paper' in different languages, thus making records language independent.