[Simple] Address and person URIs

[Henning Schulzrinne <hgs at cs.columbia.edu>]

In idle curiosity, I looked around a bit to see if others had thought 
about URIs representing postal and in-person resources. (2396bis 
explicitly mentions persons as resources.) One such discussion ist at

http://www.mail-archive.com/www-talk at w3.org/msg00673.html

While we obviously don't need or want to design such a thing now, having 
some estimation as to its practicality might guide us as to whether 
relying on some future definition is prudent. After all, we wouldn't 
want to have a spec that says "We need a perpetuum mobile here; the 
details are for future study.".

The basic problem with a "human" URI is that there does not appear to be 
a unique, universally accepted identifier for humans except one that 
each human picks randomly from a very large space. References to the 
'mark of the beast' are left to other discussion venues. (Even then, I 
suspect that lots of Chinese will randomly pick human:888888 
[http://www.travelchinaguide.com/intro/social_customs/lucky_number.htm])

For human-to-human communication, it is also more often than not 
unnecessary to know which precise DNA instantiation will be meeting me. 
Indeed, for privacy reasons, such unique identification is undesirable. 
Thus, unique identifiers are the wrong model for identifying 
human-to-human interaction. While, therefore, a human is a resource, an 
identifier is unnecessary and undesirable, making a URI scheme dubious 
at best.

The problems with a "postal" URI are less severe, but the discussions 
surrounding the civic address format in the geopriv working group have 
shown that this is far from trivial. With the CIPID vcard element, it 
also seems unclear as to why this would be helpful in practice.

Henning

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