3rd General Assembly of RACE networkRFID

The 3rd General Assembly of RACE networkRFID was held at the new Frankfurt University campus on March 25th, 2010.

My company, Link, is an associated member of RACE networkRFID, a network designed to become a federating platform to the benefit of all European Stakeholders in the development, adoption and usage of RFID.

About the meeting itself you can follow the announcement at the public site. For now I’d like to make a reference to the RACE database of RFID use cases. The result of WP3, the RACE database of RFID use cases is now on-line and accessible to the members, who are strongly encouraged to connect and enter their use cases. We will soon start submitting some of the RFID we are working on, and I encourage all the readers to do the same. It’s free!

It was a great opportunity to share our experience and expectations over RFID, and above all to share the next generation of projects we are working on. In this respect I’ve had the opportunity to present to some of members our investment on rfrbNET project, a Track & Trace Federated Network. rfrbNet is co-financed by QREN (National Strategic Reference Framework), the framing for the application of the Community’s policy for economic and social cohesion in Portugal.

These meetings give us an opportunity to do some networking among the participants - I was naturally particularly interested on promoting rfrbNet.

And here we are:

Here are some photos of our host, the new Frankfurt University campus:

Finally I had an opportunity to do a little sightseeing on Frankfurt. It’s a quite city with a curious blend of history and modernity. Here’s a dramatic (probably over photoshoped…) photo:

1st Workshop “Internet of Things”

Yesterday we had our first Workshop on “Internet of Things”. This workshops joins Link consultants and Instituto Superior Técnico M.Sc. and PhD students on a series of state-of-the-art and business presentations. The areas of interest are RFID, logistics and enterprise information systems.

One of the presented projects was my current I&D project: rfrbNET: RFID track & trace federated network.

rfrbNET: RFID track & trace federated network

I’ve being devoting my last year to project rfrbNET, a RFID Track & Trace Federated Network (in Portuguese: Rede Federada de Rastreabilidade de Bens).

This project facilitates the building of a network of supply-chain participating peers over EPCGlobal standards. Objects represented by EPC tags transverse this peers, where these movements and respective business context is first captured and later delivered through a standard EPCIS interface. Although a reality right now, this interface is designed over a point-to-point logic, meaning you can query about EPC events directly against an EPCIS, but lacking the way to ask what EPCISes have information about these tags.

This problem is defined by the EPCGlobal as Discoverability, and is still a work in progress. To address the discoverability we have to solve problems like security, identity, privacy, protection of business data, policy rules and above all the architecture that can support it. To make it work, we have to frame it on a federation model that guarantee scalability and easy provisioning of accounts, and defining it's governance rules.

We are finishing the rfrbNET dissemination site, as soon as launch it announce it here.

This project co-financed by the QREN (National Strategic Reference Framework), the framing for the application of the Community’s policy for economic and social cohesion in Portugal.