Identifiers in CIQ schemes

[colin.wallis@ssc.govt.nz]

Dear TC

We have been having some debate here in NZ Government circles about the need to develop a unique identifier for each address.  This would be in addition to using, say, Customer ID in xCIL.  This idea is to be able to link the various types of address (physical, geospatial, emergency, rural) held in government through the use of an id which all agencies can map back to their own records.  We would also need to validate that with fields like: authors name, last updated date and reason for update.  There are several issues around this but a key one, is how we might handle it in XML address files.
1) Should we consider an address identifier for future releases?
2) Should this be part of the actual xAL address file or remain outside it?

What re-ignited my thinking on this was this release from W3C:
http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2005-02-09-a.html