I have no special expertise in URIs. I've come to grips with the common misunderstandings. The main resource is RFC2396. Re-reading this spec always reveals more. I think it's useful to have ones that say they are independent.
Many protocols use URIs at core.
This comes from my work in RDF, using URIs as very abstract things. I'm interested in talking about existing work with URIs. Given a URI get some meta data about it. That's what the interest group is proposeing we work on. The next deliverable is a charter proposal.