Interest in EPC RFID project(s)?

[davej]

I'm not sure if this is the right forum for this question, but has the core group considered jumping into the EPC/RFID fray with a project or two? This strikes me as a huge opportunity to create very cool and ultimately ubiquitous systems, and I'd love to see an Open Source leader in this so-far pretty commercial (albeit nascent) market.

Specifically, EPCglobal has published specifications for the "EPC Network" software architecture and its components, and supposedly is encouraging open access and development based on these specs. They also have a reference implementation of two components (Savant and PML), but these are available only to developers who pay a $5000 subscription fee to their consortium. I'd love to dive into this problem, but I don't have $5000! :) So why not build a free open source implmentation?

Building an alternate EPC Network implementation is one possibility, but I think an even bigger opportunity is in implementing a framework for the application layer above, the EPC Information Service (EPCIS). This is where the beef is: applications such as retail theft detection, BSE cow tracking, inventory/ordering management are some obvious opporunities.

Anyone had any similar thoughts on EPC/RFID?

--dave

[marc.fleury]

interesting, I was reading about RFID in scientific american and it is one of these simple things where the possibilities seem endless. What is EPC? is it some software behind it?

We rarely "steer" new contributions. Let me explain it: if it is important to you then you would probably contribute it yourself. That is the way it works. So we wouldn't stop you from contributing.

[devr]

Hi Dave,

Have you made any progress on this EPC/RFID solution on JBoss?

JBoss does have a partnership with Webmethods which does have a "RFID" solution. http://www.webmethods.com/solutions/wM_RFID/, from the initial specs it appears that an Application Server would be unable to handle the volume of data and the associated queries from a RFID source(100 transactions per second). This would require setting up JBoss as an Operational Data Store, I am not sure if this fits in the mainstream JBoss space. To your point however, Services is a good candidate. It should be possible to host the RFID server as a JBoss Service?

-Dev

[hbaxmann]

... just a cut and paste quote of Ted Kosan from the embedlets mailinglist:



Here is the link to SUN's new RFID website:

http://wwws.sun.com/software/solutions/auto_id

The 'Architecture' document contained there indicates how much work they had to
do in order to accommodate reading large numbers of tags in a short span of
time. One important aspect of this new architecture is that the Savant servers
are really high-powered embedded systems that are deployed near the RFID
readers.

One implication of this is that what use to be a J2EE application that was
located completely in the backend infrastructure is now an application that is
partially located in the backend infrastructure and partially distributed
throughout the facility in embedded devices.

The process of how the J2EE community is going to accommodate this new class of
application is one of the things that is most interesting to me.



bax