URIhin

URIhin is a proposed conceptual framework for creating human-friendly identifiers that co-exist with traditional URIs. It seeks to bridge human readability and machine interpretability by offering a parallel, human-readable path while retaining a canonical machine URI for processing and linking.

The term and idea emerged in technical discussions about web semantics in the 2010s. URIhin is not an adopted standard; it remains a concept explored in research and experimental tooling. Proponents argue it could lower entry barriers for users when navigating large web resources and improve multilingual disambiguation by allowing language-specific slugs.

In practice, a URIhin identity would pair a readable slug with a resolver that translates the slug into a conventional URI that software uses to fetch resources. A typical format might be a two-part string: hin://slug/path?lang=en, with a secondary, canonical URI used behind the scenes. A resolver maintains mappings from human-friendly identifiers to canonical URIs, supports language tagging, and enforces uniqueness across resources.

Because it is not standardized, implementations vary and rely on custom resolvers, dictionaries, or service-level agreements. Potential benefits include improved accessibility, easier link sharing, and multilingual search. Challenges include maintaining up-to-date mappings, performance costs, and ensuring backward compatibility with existing URIs. Critics point to potential fragmentation and the risk of overloading the identifier space with human-centric slugs.

See also: URLs, URIs, URNs, and concepts in internationalization and human-readable identifiers.