Dear all, I don't really intend to fire up a new discussion about GUIDs, but I came across some pretty good documents about URIs I thought I share with you. They adress pretty much all of our needs for persistent and resolvable identifiers in these texts.
(1) http://www.dfki.uni-kl.de/dfkidok/publications/TM/07/01/tm-07-01.pdf "Cool URIs for the Semantic Web" by Leo Sauermann DFKI GmbH, Richard Cyganiak Freie Universität Berlin (D2R author), Max Völkel FZI Karlsruhe The authors of this document come from the semantic web community and discuss what kind of URIs should be used for RDF resources.
(2) http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/URNsAndRegistries-50 This one here is written by the W3C and addresses the questions "When should URNs or URIs with novel URI schemes be used to name information resources for the Web?" The answers given are "Rarely if ever" and "Probably not". Common arguments in favor of such novel naming schemas are examined, and their properties compared with those of the existing http: URI scheme.
best wishes, Markus Döring