Paul Mockapetris, the inventor of DNS has written an article at CircleID called Letting DNS Loose about extending DNS to handle the same tasks ENUM -- mapping names to phone numbers. Of course, thats just the start, why not extend it to do RFID mapping and so on. Paul's point is that we don't really need to build a whole new infrastructure to do most of what needs doing and re-using the existing infrastructure isn't just cheaper, its proven. As Paul points out, the issue is political, not technical.