Security considerations in the design and peering of RFID discovery services

There is growing interest in Discovery Services for locating RFID and supply chain data between companies globally, to obtain product lifecycle information for individual objects. Discovery Services are heralded as a means to find serial-level data from previously unknown parties, however more realistically they provide a means to reduce the communications load on the information services, the network and the requesting client application. Attempts to design a standardised Discovery Service will not succeed unless security is considered in every aspect of the design. In this paper we clearly show that security cannot be bolted-on in the form of access control, although this is also required. The basic communication model of the Discovery Service critically affects who shares what data with whom, and what level of trust is required between the interacting parties. © 2009 IEEE.

An integrated representation of the services provided by global water resources

Water is essential not only to maintain the livelihoods of human beings but also to sustain ecosystems. Over the last few decades several global assessments have reviewed current and future uses of water, and have offered potential solutions to a possible water crisis. However, these have tended to focus on water supply rather than on the range of demands for all water services (including those of ecosystems). In this paper, a holistic global view of water resources and the services they provide is presented, using Sankey diagrams as a visualisation tool. These diagrams provide a valuable addition to the spatial maps of other global assessments, as they track the sources, uses, services and sinks of water resources. They facilitate comparison of different water services, and highlight trade-offs amongst them. For example, they reveal how increasing the supply of water resources to one service (crop production) can generate a reduction in provision of other water services (e.g., to ecosystem maintenance). The potential impacts of efficiency improvements in the use of water are also highlighted; for example, reduction in soil evaporation from crop production through better farming practices, or the results of improved treatment and re-use of return flows leading to reduction of delivery to final sinks. This paper also outlines the measures needed to ensure sustainable water resource use and supply for multiple competing services in the future, and emphasises that integrated management of land and water resources is essential to achieve this goal. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd.

WWW++ - Adding why to what, when and where

RFID technology can be used to its fullest potential only with software to supplement the hardware with powerful capabilities for data capture, filtering, counting and storage. The EPCglobal Network architecture encourages minimizing the amount of business logic embedded in the tags, readers and middleware. This creates the need for a Business Logic Layer above the event filtering layer that enhances basic observation events with business context - i.e. in addition to the (what, when, where) information about an observation, it adds context information about why the object was there. The purpose of this project is to develop an implementation of the Business Logic Layer. This application accepts observation event data (e.g. from the Application Level Events (ALE) standard interface), enriches them with business context and provides these enriched events to a repository of business-level events (e.g. via the EPC Information Services (EPCIS) capture interface). The strength of the application lies in the automatic addition of business context. It is quick and easy to adapt any business process to the framework suggested and equally easy to reconfigure it if the business process is changed. A sample application has been developed for a business scenario in the retail sector.