The W3C website proclaims:

"W3C leads the evolution of the web, empowering individuals, increasing social and economic efficiency, and exploiting the power of computing in our everyday lives. Exploiting that power is the mission of the W3C Architecture Domain."

As described on the W3C website:

"The Architecture Domain has the mission to maintain and extend some of the Core technologies of the World Wide Web, including URI/IRI, XML, DOM, Web Services, and Internationalization. The W3C Architecture technologies enable people to exchange data on the Web every day from the protocol level, with HTTP and SOAP, and to the application level, with XML, XML Schema, or WSDL. It also includes technologies for data manipulation, with XSL Transformations, DOM, or XML Query.

"Our focus is to improve the stability of the existing platform, with our work on XML, Web Services, or Internationalization. This includes interoperability between world wide applications, and extending their capabilities." W3C's work on Uniform Resource Identifiers and Web Services falls under this Domain.