Thanks for posting the pointer to Tim Berners-Lee's Semantic Web project. The handle proposal goes in the opposite direction to the Semantic Web. Handles provide continuity without any direct connection to or dependence on outside meaning. Their value derives entirely from the accumulation of meaning across many uses of the same handle. The handle allows the accumulation, but it provides no meaning on its own. In the computing and communications business, it is almost always a win to separate components of a service that are logically distinct. Given a good design and implementation of a handle system, people who work on services that attach meaning to transactions are free to focus on meaning, and can more easily resist complicated entanglement between meaning and the tokens to which it is attached.

Repeat: A handle system provides services that have nothing directly to do with human notions of meaning. It supports other services that deal with meaning, by providing them a mechanism for accumulating meaning reliably across a number of different transactions with the same handle.