[DAS2] Why use URIs for feature IDs?

[Helt,Gregg]

      Regarding using URIs for DAS features, here's the quote from Paul
Prescod that I used in the original DAS/2 grant proposal addressing the
question "why use URIs?".  From
http://www.prescod.net/rest/rpc_for_get.html : 

You can give that URI address to anyone, anywhere and they can reuse it.
In particular this means that we can compose applications that were not
thought of in advance. Google is an example of an application that was
composed "after the fact" out of URIs. Yahoo is another...There are a
raft of deployed W3C recommendations that work with information related
through URIs. Many of these are XML-related specifications that work as
well in API-like applications as in user interface-based applications.
These include: XPath, XPointer, XSLT, XLink, RDF, XInclude, XQuery,
xml-stylesheet.  Information published through HTTP URIs can be combined
through XInclude, queried and sorted through XQuery and XSLT, visually
rendered with xml-stylesheet, related through RDF, linked through XLink,
pointed into through XPointer.