Paul, I'm a big fan of @branch for situations like this. This should give us the room needed to discuss this properly.

Thanks for the w3.org reference. It's very much in line of my thinking. I'm surprised that more people don't appreciate this distinction (or if they do, it's not discussed much)

No problem. Found your writing today, and listened to the dConstruct talk. In my mind, the internet = the delivery platform, standards (and your thinking) is the next layer up, and then I'd see the Web as a layer on top, linking together concepts. Although it's mainly being used in academia & scientific study at the moment, I think there's massive potential to do so fun stuff with it!

I've recently begun to call myself a web designer, in that I design webs - completely agree with your point about UX going much deeper than the surface! It'd be interesting to get your take on the TimBL stuff.

Yeah, work is a bit busy so I'm going to have to take a break until tonight when I can properly read it and post back. But I will add for now that my thinking isn't *just* about URIs. These are indeed the building blocks of the web but they are nothing without a search engine to actually find them.

My scheme breaks this up into two parts. The first is a rudimentary form of 'local dns' where all nearby devices will respond and you can just pick one. The second is to take that whole local ball of data and round trip it to a service (like Google or Bing) to rank these devices for you.

So in that sense I want more that JUST URIs, I also want a discover/ranking service that can sit on top of them.

Interesting. I guess for me the intriguing thing to throw into the mix is - what if the URIs themselves identify objects, devices, cultural things, restaurants etc?

As I say, I'm guessing it's pretty much taken as read in your thinking, so nothing too drastic to adapt to, but wanted to point you in that direction just in case it was new. Happy to chat more about it when you've got more time.

Take care :-)