SFC Laboratory, Keio University
Vice President, Auto-ID Center Japan Laboratory
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RFID has rapidly become a hot technology in recent months. Osamu Nakamura at SFC Laboratory of Keio University disussed the future of this technology from the perspective of "real space networking".
Interent has been used by people to get information from cyberspace, he said. FTP, mail, and telnet for example, have been used as tools to transfer information. Gopher was used for finding information, and WinMX and Winny is being used for sharing it.
He pointed out that Internet is going beyond cyberspace and into "real space", or people's daily lives. In the real space network, all things will carry digital information with them, and we will have the power to carry out searches by product names or locations. We will know, for example, the producers and produced locations of vegitables sold at supermarkets, or search the BEST BY dates for milk in the home refregerators. We will be able to find relationships among different things, which provides basis for new applications for various scenes in our daily lives, said Nakamura.
But how would this real space network come into play? WE have seen various attempts to put computer and Internet to real space objects. But it is almost impossible to embed computers in all things of the world.
That's why RFID is necessary. RFID works by giving weak radiowaves to register or retrieve information. RFID can be used with proxies attached to the Internet. RFIDs can communicate with other real space objects by mapping RFIDs with proxies. RFIDs need only return ID information at the least. Information search can be performed by proxies, which have high computational power.
Nakamura is vice president of the Japan laboratory of Auto-ID Center, an RFID standardization initiative backed by Masachucetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He talked about the overview of this initiative and its current activities.
He explained that Auto-ID uses PML, or Physical Markup Language, based on XML, for goods description. He also detailed the mechanism of Object Name Service (ONS), for accessing a PML server appropreate for each electronic code.
RFID is expected to replace current barcode system in product distribution process.
The price of RFID can be as low as several cents each, and several large corporations in the United States are beginning to use it for limited logistics management. Future replacement of barcode system with RFID will have a profound economic impact, Nakamura added.
If the challenge of who bears the cost of RFID is overcome, various products will be delivered to consumers with RFID, offering various product-related information in real space network.
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