A short snapper from c|net: Standards body tries to improve on URLs 8JAN03 […] “OASIS said it has formed a technical committee to work out how resources–such as data and services–can be placed and found on a network without their being tied to a URL on a specific machine. To do this, the committee is designing the OASIS Extensible Resource Identifier (XRI) […] ”XRI syntax will be fully federated, the way DNS (domain name system) and IP (Internet Protocol) addressing are today””