(January 22, 2003) - Members of the OASIS standards body are collaborating to address a key challenge in distributed directory services and data sharing - establishing a common identification scheme that can be used across all domains, applications, and transport protocols. The OASIS Extensible Resource Identifier (XRI) Technical Committee will define a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) scheme and a corresponding Uniform Resource (URN) namespace that meet these requirements, as well as basic mechanisms for resolving XRIs and exchanging data and metadata associated with XRI-identified resources.

Drummond Reed of OneName, XRI Technical Committee co-chair, explained, "XRI syntax will be fully federated, the way DNS and IP addressing are today, yet will still address the problem of how to identify the same logical resource stored in different physical locations - for example, the same file stored on different file servers, or the same invoice stored in different accounting systems." The syntax will allow for identifiers optimized for both human and machine readability, and will provide for internationalization in the same manner as XML.

Participation in the OASIS XRI Technical Committee remains open to all organizations and individuals, and completed work will be freely available to the public without licensing or other fees.