Place Identifiers: Describing Position, Location, and Virtual World References

The concept of place is fundamental to understanding of the world around us, but what constitutes place to one person might be quite different to someone else. Recently, providing a Web address (URL) is an option, as long as the URL, by itself, is unique enough and doesn´t require searching through a citywide list of a hundred cafes on a corporate website. This paper introduces two projects that focus on the representation of place information. The first is the Place Identifier (PI) Project, a conceptual project that defines a reference model referred to as the PI Architecture. The second project is an XML encoding grammar referred to as Schema for the Description of Place Information (PlaceXML), which extends place identifier functionality.