CURIs are Compressed URIs which are easier to share and use wherever it is desirable to replace a long and verbose URI with something a little bit easier for humans to type or short message services to transmit.
The way it works: all URIs are stored in a database table which keeps a unique id number. This number is then converted to base58 encoding, which uses lowercase letters, uppercase letters and numbers from 1 to 9. Note that uppercase letters I and O are not used in this encoding to eliminate misinterpreting the letters O and I as numbers 0 and 1.
Creating Compressed URIs through the API:
GET /c/create?uri=<URI>&res=json
Returns a JSON object containing 2 elements:
{uri:"<Original URI>",c_uri:"<Compressed URI>"}