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Re: [Simple] Address and person URIs
inline.
Henning Schulzrinne wrote:
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 actual proposal at http://infomesh.net/2001/03/address/ seems
reasonable to me. It looks old though, and I suspect went nowhere. I
think it would actually be a lot of work to do this properly, given
issues of variations in addressing structure and hierarchy,
internationalization issues, equality, etc.
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])
I don't think we want to label a human, per se. What we really want for
person to person communications is a place - i.e., "room 527".
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.
Actually I suspect that, if you think of it in terms of "go here to talk
to me", then the same postal URI structure would probably work, but just
a different scheme.
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.
Well, another solution is to somehow define a URI scheme that just
contains a reference to such a vcard.
-Jonathan R.
--
Jonathan D. Rosenberg, Ph.D. 600 Lanidex Plaza
Chief Technology Officer Parsippany, NJ 07054-2711
dynamicsoft
jdrosen at dynamicsoft.com FAX: (973) 952-5050
http://www.jdrosen.net PHONE: (973) 952-5000
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