According to Wendy Hall, a longstanding colleague of Berners-Lee.., the babies of the future, for example, will have a web address instead of a National Insurance Number. Hall said: ‘I have a vision that in the future when a baby is born you’ll get some sort of internet ID that is effectively your digital persona, and it will grow with you. It will actually represent you in some way – what you know, what you’ve done, your experiences. I guess you’d call it your URI [Uniform Resource Identity]. This is the thing that always identifies you. Every time you do something on the internet, it is effectively logged, building up this profile that is with you for your life. Then you have your life’s record, which can include any legal documents or photographs or videos that you might have, that you can pass on to your children. We will be able to build software that can interpret that profile to help get the answer that you need in the context that you’re in.’

Quoted from here.

If this isn’t an endorsement of URL-based identity then I haven’t seen one … great! Of course, I would want to suggest that we don’t want to have a single URL-based identity throughout our lives, and instead want to use several, or even a very large number of URIs that cannot be correlated directly. But having URLs instead of National Insurance Numbers, or US Social Security Numbers sounds rather straightforward.

The idea of re-interpreting URI to mean Uniform Resource Identity from somebody involved in the W3C is something unexpected … I got to think about that…