Physical World Hyperlinks

The Pondering Primate has been chattering away about PWHs, or Physical World Hyperlinks for ages. The potential is obvious.

In my world, many of our customers use RFID on their books and self-service terminals from intellident, 3M or other partners. This is the same thing as a PWH in many ways, apart from one key thing. They're local, proprietary and constrained in purpose.

I had thought the ISBN13, ISBN joining the EAN world, might help but I've since discovered that EAN get reclaimed and re-used once a product is not being retailed. So in 20 years I might find an old tin of beans, check out the EAN and find it's been re-issued to Oakley sun glasses. Permanence in Hyperlinks is important, so this isn't ideal.

TMS looks like a really nice new approach. It's a machine-readable tag designed to be read by a phone camera - how long before I have glasses that can read them?