URIs have provided the Web with the powerful concept of hyperlinking between resources on internetworked systems. It has enabled access to not just the resources themselves, but also to subparts of them such as through the use of fragments (#) on html pages, or through queries (?) for server-side pre-processing. Time-continuous resources such as audio and video files are increasingly put on the Web these days - providing product information seems easier to give in a video than on a textual page. However, the URI access to such resources remains at the level of file names as there is no standard way to provide deep access to time offsets.

CSIRO has developed a scheme to enable temporal hyperlinks within the generic URI syntax. We have published that scheme through the IETF and are currently pursuing its standardisation with the Internet and Web standards bodies (IETF and W3C). As it is an open and format-independent scheme, existing Web media players may find it simple to support. This talk presents the scheme and explains similarities to existing standards for addressing temporal offsets, and to other temporal URI schemes for proprietary formats. Feel free to give us feedback on the usefulness of the scheme for your particular application.