1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:02,730 STEVE MILES: So we will move right 2 00:00:02,730 --> 00:00:06,180 into the first of the technology sessions 3 00:00:06,180 --> 00:00:09,360 now, which is focused on the network, 4 00:00:09,360 --> 00:00:10,620 the Internet of Things. 5 00:00:10,620 --> 00:00:13,080 And our first speaker is Steve Bratt, 6 00:00:13,080 --> 00:00:18,090 who is the CEO of the WC3, which is also based here at MIT. 7 00:00:18,090 --> 00:00:20,580 STEVEN BRATT: Thanks very much, Steve. 8 00:00:20,580 --> 00:00:22,140 It's going to be difficult to follow 9 00:00:22,140 --> 00:00:24,450 that wonderful talk by Sanjay. 10 00:00:24,450 --> 00:00:26,340 And I only have about 10 minutes to tell you 11 00:00:26,340 --> 00:00:29,495 about a lot of cool things that are going on at W3C right now. 12 00:00:29,495 --> 00:00:31,620 And so I'm going to be doing it a very light touch, 13 00:00:31,620 --> 00:00:34,110 just hopefully going to tweak your interest enough 14 00:00:34,110 --> 00:00:36,330 to come and ask more questions, come 15 00:00:36,330 --> 00:00:39,300 and talk to the W3C about some of the work we're doing. 16 00:00:39,300 --> 00:00:41,020 And the title of the talk is RFID, 17 00:00:41,020 --> 00:00:43,480 Things on the Web of Data and Services. 18 00:00:43,480 --> 00:00:46,890 And as a slight contrast to an idea of an Internet of Things, 19 00:00:46,890 --> 00:00:48,490 it's things on the internet. 20 00:00:48,490 --> 00:00:50,580 And that's the way I like to get people 21 00:00:50,580 --> 00:00:54,100 to think about the use of Web technologies as you go ahead 22 00:00:54,100 --> 00:00:57,300 and address the very complex research problems that Sanjay 23 00:00:57,300 --> 00:00:59,550 laid out before you. 24 00:00:59,550 --> 00:01:01,433 Oh, and by the way, the talk is also linked. 25 00:01:01,433 --> 00:01:02,100 It's on the Web. 26 00:01:02,100 --> 00:01:03,570 No surprise. 27 00:01:03,570 --> 00:01:05,069 And it's linked from our homepage. 28 00:01:05,069 --> 00:01:07,410 If you don't remember the URI here, go to our home page. 29 00:01:07,410 --> 00:01:11,670 There's a public presentations link right from the home page. 30 00:01:11,670 --> 00:01:14,500 And you'll find my talk hopefully pretty easily. 31 00:01:14,500 --> 00:01:17,130 So one slide about the W3C itself. 32 00:01:17,130 --> 00:01:19,950 How many people here have never heard of the World Wide Web 33 00:01:19,950 --> 00:01:21,620 Consortium? 34 00:01:21,620 --> 00:01:23,840 Don't be embarrassed if you haven't. 35 00:01:23,840 --> 00:01:25,850 So anyway, World Wide Web Consortium 36 00:01:25,850 --> 00:01:29,780 was founded by Tim Berners-Lee just 11 years ago 37 00:01:29,780 --> 00:01:35,150 now in December in 1994, started here at MIT. 38 00:01:35,150 --> 00:01:38,030 We now have 18 offices around the world. 39 00:01:38,030 --> 00:01:41,930 We have about 400 members, corporate, university, 40 00:01:41,930 --> 00:01:43,040 organizational. 41 00:01:43,040 --> 00:01:48,185 We have also a vision to-- 42 00:01:48,185 --> 00:01:51,500 a mission to provide a vision for the development of Web 43 00:01:51,500 --> 00:01:52,730 technologies into the future. 44 00:01:52,730 --> 00:01:54,890 And also, we engineer the standards 45 00:01:54,890 --> 00:01:56,120 that make the Web work. 46 00:01:56,120 --> 00:01:58,620 And I'll tell you more about a couple of those later. 47 00:01:58,620 --> 00:02:00,200 But the Web really has changed a lot 48 00:02:00,200 --> 00:02:02,660 from the time Tim first invented this thing. 49 00:02:02,660 --> 00:02:05,233 And it's really become a really integral part 50 00:02:05,233 --> 00:02:06,650 of our fundamental infrastructure. 51 00:02:06,650 --> 00:02:08,942 I thought one of the good questions that was brought up 52 00:02:08,942 --> 00:02:11,650 this morning, I think by John, was 53 00:02:11,650 --> 00:02:13,670 you need to engineer an infrastructure that's 54 00:02:13,670 --> 00:02:16,350 going to last not for a year or two years, 55 00:02:16,350 --> 00:02:17,570 but maybe for 100 years. 56 00:02:17,570 --> 00:02:20,300 And an interesting question to ask is, is the Web like that? 57 00:02:20,300 --> 00:02:21,890 Is the Web the next telephone? 58 00:02:21,890 --> 00:02:24,170 Is the Web technology so pervasive now and so 59 00:02:24,170 --> 00:02:26,690 good that it's going to be with us for a long time? 60 00:02:26,690 --> 00:02:28,482 And that's going to be an integral question 61 00:02:28,482 --> 00:02:29,857 to ask yourselves and whether you 62 00:02:29,857 --> 00:02:31,550 want to gamble on using Web technologies 63 00:02:31,550 --> 00:02:34,860 as a foundation for your data infrastructure or not. 64 00:02:34,860 --> 00:02:36,830 So we'll talk mainly about the Web 65 00:02:36,830 --> 00:02:38,840 as it's moving from a Web of documents 66 00:02:38,840 --> 00:02:40,220 to a Web of data and services. 67 00:02:40,220 --> 00:02:41,043 I'll focus on that. 68 00:02:41,043 --> 00:02:43,460 But there's also a number of other things we're working on 69 00:02:43,460 --> 00:02:46,440 at W3C, of moving Web technologies to everything, 70 00:02:46,440 --> 00:02:48,500 including phones, and cars, and planes, 71 00:02:48,500 --> 00:02:50,990 and other kinds of places, and a Web for everyone. 72 00:02:50,990 --> 00:02:52,870 As we expand to a developing world, 73 00:02:52,870 --> 00:02:55,250 we're going to be taking a greater and greater advantage 74 00:02:55,250 --> 00:02:58,320 of the benefits that the Web has brought the Western world up 75 00:02:58,320 --> 00:02:59,390 till now. 76 00:02:59,390 --> 00:03:04,500 So one thing I think is clear, to me anyhow, 77 00:03:04,500 --> 00:03:08,010 is that the Web really increased the usefulness of the internet 78 00:03:08,010 --> 00:03:09,045 for everyone. 79 00:03:09,045 --> 00:03:10,920 The internet had been around for a long time. 80 00:03:10,920 --> 00:03:12,600 People used it, academics largely 81 00:03:12,600 --> 00:03:14,140 and government and so on. 82 00:03:14,140 --> 00:03:17,370 Web technologies, through some very simple concepts 83 00:03:17,370 --> 00:03:20,640 that Tim instituted and pulled from many parts of the computer 84 00:03:20,640 --> 00:03:24,600 science world, HTTP as a protocol, but more importantly 85 00:03:24,600 --> 00:03:27,510 the use of uniform resource identifiers, or URIs, 86 00:03:27,510 --> 00:03:29,310 or IRIs, whatever you want to call them, 87 00:03:29,310 --> 00:03:34,110 URLs as unique identifiers and as unique identifiers of where 88 00:03:34,110 --> 00:03:35,880 something is and a unique identifier 89 00:03:35,880 --> 00:03:38,200 to distinguish that item from other things. 90 00:03:38,200 --> 00:03:42,300 Very simple concept that's critical for the Web and really 91 00:03:42,300 --> 00:03:44,280 critical for you guys, of course. 92 00:03:44,280 --> 00:03:46,350 And then also HTML is a simple way 93 00:03:46,350 --> 00:03:48,710 to link things, to link documents 94 00:03:48,710 --> 00:03:51,210 to other documents or parts of documents to other documents. 95 00:03:51,210 --> 00:03:53,010 That's it, really simple. 96 00:03:53,010 --> 00:03:54,900 And just with those simple concepts, 97 00:03:54,900 --> 00:03:58,500 we really-- and standardizing these in the global way really 98 00:03:58,500 --> 00:04:02,430 revolutionize the way that we can identify and find 99 00:04:02,430 --> 00:04:08,950 retrieved documents of all kinds and sorts and around the world. 100 00:04:08,950 --> 00:04:11,970 So if the aim is to put RFID things on the internet, 101 00:04:11,970 --> 00:04:13,550 at least I hope the group-- 102 00:04:13,550 --> 00:04:16,050 and there are a lot of research problems in this in itself-- 103 00:04:16,050 --> 00:04:19,079 will carefully look at the existing and emerging 104 00:04:19,079 --> 00:04:21,810 Web technologies before going off and inventing something 105 00:04:21,810 --> 00:04:22,540 new. 106 00:04:22,540 --> 00:04:25,128 I think that's a logical thing you should do. 107 00:04:25,128 --> 00:04:26,670 And I hope that what I tell you today 108 00:04:26,670 --> 00:04:30,020 will motivate you more to do that. 109 00:04:30,020 --> 00:04:32,440 So the new work that's going on at W3C 110 00:04:32,440 --> 00:04:36,083 in the area of Web services and in the area of the Semantic Web 111 00:04:36,083 --> 00:04:38,500 really are going to expand the Web to include more machine 112 00:04:38,500 --> 00:04:41,710 understandable resources of a variety of kinds. 113 00:04:41,710 --> 00:04:43,160 That's really important. 114 00:04:43,160 --> 00:04:44,620 And one thing that it's going to do 115 00:04:44,620 --> 00:04:49,000 is it's going to enable you to have greater interoperability 116 00:04:49,000 --> 00:04:52,142 amongst the things that you know you want to link together. 117 00:04:52,142 --> 00:04:54,100 So it makes sense for you to go off and develop 118 00:04:54,100 --> 00:04:55,690 schemas and other kinds of things that 119 00:04:55,690 --> 00:04:56,978 make sense in your community. 120 00:04:56,978 --> 00:04:59,020 And that'll probably work for the group of people 121 00:04:59,020 --> 00:05:00,978 you've brought together at that particular time 122 00:05:00,978 --> 00:05:02,270 and in that particular place. 123 00:05:02,270 --> 00:05:05,560 But if the goal is to perhaps be able to enable 124 00:05:05,560 --> 00:05:07,738 linking to things you haven't foreseen-- 125 00:05:07,738 --> 00:05:10,030 and that's really what made the Web powerful, isn't it? 126 00:05:10,030 --> 00:05:11,680 People didn't really appreciate all the things 127 00:05:11,680 --> 00:05:13,870 you would be doing with the Web today when Tim first 128 00:05:13,870 --> 00:05:17,110 invented it 15 years ago. 129 00:05:17,110 --> 00:05:18,880 But I think one of the keys is providing-- 130 00:05:18,880 --> 00:05:21,190 using these globally interoperable standards will 131 00:05:21,190 --> 00:05:24,430 help you to link between resources you have not yet 132 00:05:24,430 --> 00:05:26,830 decided you're going to want to link. 133 00:05:26,830 --> 00:05:29,340 So two areas of emerging standards-- and I'm 134 00:05:29,340 --> 00:05:31,340 only going to have time to talk about one today. 135 00:05:31,340 --> 00:05:32,590 One is the Semantic Web. 136 00:05:32,590 --> 00:05:35,950 And a very simple elevator or bumper sticker 137 00:05:35,950 --> 00:05:37,992 is that that's really a Web of data. 138 00:05:37,992 --> 00:05:39,700 So it's really providing interoperability 139 00:05:39,700 --> 00:05:44,200 at a data level and allow you to better understand, search for, 140 00:05:44,200 --> 00:05:47,145 share, reuse, aggregate data on the Web. 141 00:05:47,145 --> 00:05:49,520 And then there's Web services, which probably more of you 142 00:05:49,520 --> 00:05:50,230 are familiar with. 143 00:05:50,230 --> 00:05:51,710 So I'm not going to spend any time on that. 144 00:05:51,710 --> 00:05:53,127 But I've got a lot of extra slides 145 00:05:53,127 --> 00:05:55,270 at the end of this presentation really 146 00:05:55,270 --> 00:05:57,850 to enable a Web of interoperable programs. 147 00:05:57,850 --> 00:05:59,410 So it's basically providing some kind 148 00:05:59,410 --> 00:06:01,702 of-- if you want to think about it in a simplistic way, 149 00:06:01,702 --> 00:06:04,780 it's APIs to build the access, expose applications 150 00:06:04,780 --> 00:06:07,270 that you have, and be able to provide access to those. 151 00:06:07,270 --> 00:06:09,432 We won't talk about that much more today. 152 00:06:09,432 --> 00:06:11,390 So in terms of the Semantic Web, there's also-- 153 00:06:11,390 --> 00:06:12,830 like everybody's got a stack. 154 00:06:12,830 --> 00:06:15,350 And the Semantic Web really starts 155 00:06:15,350 --> 00:06:21,440 about where this RDF core red brick is there in the stack. 156 00:06:21,440 --> 00:06:23,913 But it's based firmly on the use of URIs. 157 00:06:23,913 --> 00:06:25,580 And that's really important because URIs 158 00:06:25,580 --> 00:06:29,300 become the fundamental way to identify a unique identifier 159 00:06:29,300 --> 00:06:33,210 for anything in the Semantic Web world, 160 00:06:33,210 --> 00:06:38,198 just like for you guys RFID tags or RFID numbers are critical. 161 00:06:38,198 --> 00:06:40,740 There's no reason an RFID number can't be made into it a URI. 162 00:06:40,740 --> 00:06:41,723 It's really simple. 163 00:06:41,723 --> 00:06:43,140 And then also, there's other kinds 164 00:06:43,140 --> 00:06:45,210 of standards that are in the stack which 165 00:06:45,210 --> 00:06:49,080 enable you to express relationships between data. 166 00:06:49,080 --> 00:06:50,790 And we'll talk about that one later. 167 00:06:50,790 --> 00:06:52,467 That's RDF. 168 00:06:52,467 --> 00:06:54,300 Also, a number of other standards here, too. 169 00:06:54,300 --> 00:06:55,678 Another key will be OWL. 170 00:06:55,678 --> 00:06:56,970 You'll see the OWL thing there. 171 00:06:56,970 --> 00:06:58,500 It's a Web Ontology Language to be 172 00:06:58,500 --> 00:07:01,662 able to set up a description of some domain of knowledge, 173 00:07:01,662 --> 00:07:03,120 maybe a domain related specifically 174 00:07:03,120 --> 00:07:05,370 to RFID or specifically to consumer goods 175 00:07:05,370 --> 00:07:08,430 or whatever it is, and then also other kinds of standards 176 00:07:08,430 --> 00:07:09,690 that are being developed now. 177 00:07:09,690 --> 00:07:10,980 Now, those other ones I've mentioned already 178 00:07:10,980 --> 00:07:11,897 are already standards. 179 00:07:11,897 --> 00:07:13,440 But there's new ones being developed 180 00:07:13,440 --> 00:07:17,550 to be able to do queries, put rules on the Web, logic 181 00:07:17,550 --> 00:07:22,440 and trust, security things, and other kinds of activities. 182 00:07:22,440 --> 00:07:23,920 And I only have two minutes left. 183 00:07:23,920 --> 00:07:30,810 OK, so RDF, the Resource Description Framework, 184 00:07:30,810 --> 00:07:32,670 simplify all the words on this page. 185 00:07:32,670 --> 00:07:36,060 Whereas HTML provided an ability to link documents to documents, 186 00:07:36,060 --> 00:07:39,690 RDF provides an ability to link data to data. 187 00:07:39,690 --> 00:07:41,190 And the links are not just saying, 188 00:07:41,190 --> 00:07:45,510 this links, but an explanation of how that one thing relates 189 00:07:45,510 --> 00:07:46,680 to another thing. 190 00:07:46,680 --> 00:07:48,610 So subject, property, value. 191 00:07:48,610 --> 00:07:52,320 So for instance, I could say that my talk, the subject 192 00:07:52,320 --> 00:07:55,950 might be talk has presenter Steve Bratt. 193 00:07:55,950 --> 00:07:59,550 And every one of those items itself has a URI. 194 00:07:59,550 --> 00:08:02,550 So the talk has a URI, the concept of 195 00:08:02,550 --> 00:08:05,550 has a presenter has a URI, and I have a URI. 196 00:08:05,550 --> 00:08:08,040 So all those things are not only linked together, 197 00:08:08,040 --> 00:08:10,080 but they're on the Web and accessible, 198 00:08:10,080 --> 00:08:12,690 as highly accessible as you'd like them to be. 199 00:08:12,690 --> 00:08:15,550 So the simple picture is that this is the current Web. 200 00:08:15,550 --> 00:08:19,080 It's all gray and boring, but basically extremely powerful. 201 00:08:19,080 --> 00:08:21,240 Being able to link one resource to another, 202 00:08:21,240 --> 00:08:22,890 we found how powerful it is. 203 00:08:22,890 --> 00:08:26,280 The Web of the future, we can not only link concepts together 204 00:08:26,280 --> 00:08:27,900 but also say how they are linked. 205 00:08:27,900 --> 00:08:31,330 So Jane Doe is attending a meeting. 206 00:08:31,330 --> 00:08:33,330 It's not just Jane Doe's linked to this meeting. 207 00:08:33,330 --> 00:08:35,039 There's a simple relationship. 208 00:08:35,039 --> 00:08:37,049 The linkage is that she is attending it. 209 00:08:37,049 --> 00:08:39,690 And perhaps the meeting says she's also the chair. 210 00:08:39,690 --> 00:08:41,917 And there's also information about her personal data, 211 00:08:41,917 --> 00:08:44,250 information about the location of the meeting and so on. 212 00:08:44,250 --> 00:08:45,690 All that information is contained 213 00:08:45,690 --> 00:08:48,570 using standards to syntax. 214 00:08:48,570 --> 00:08:51,457 And also, ontology is developed by domain experts. 215 00:08:51,457 --> 00:08:53,790 So in this case, it may be an international organization 216 00:08:53,790 --> 00:08:57,600 of meetings that sets up an ontology for what meetings 217 00:08:57,600 --> 00:08:58,290 are all about. 218 00:08:58,290 --> 00:09:00,450 In your field, you can imagine, getting together 219 00:09:00,450 --> 00:09:03,240 the diverse kinds of people you want to be able to use RFID, 220 00:09:03,240 --> 00:09:04,657 you're never going to get them all 221 00:09:04,657 --> 00:09:08,220 to agree on a single ontology for describing everything 222 00:09:08,220 --> 00:09:09,340 that's related to RFID. 223 00:09:09,340 --> 00:09:12,522 So another idea is to do a more ground up, a bottom up 224 00:09:12,522 --> 00:09:13,230 approach to this. 225 00:09:13,230 --> 00:09:15,960 We allow communities of people who already have places they 226 00:09:15,960 --> 00:09:18,870 meet, more generally likely to agree on things, 227 00:09:18,870 --> 00:09:21,000 to come to agreement on their ontologies, 228 00:09:21,000 --> 00:09:25,200 and then expose those in RDF, and be able to more easily link 229 00:09:25,200 --> 00:09:27,010 them than you can do now. 230 00:09:27,010 --> 00:09:29,370 So I'll show two more pictures, and then I'll 231 00:09:29,370 --> 00:09:31,320 have to skip the last couple. 232 00:09:31,320 --> 00:09:34,110 The simple enterprise integration facts 233 00:09:34,110 --> 00:09:37,050 today is that between things like stock control, and parts, 234 00:09:37,050 --> 00:09:39,810 and issue tracking, and human resource management, 235 00:09:39,810 --> 00:09:42,508 these organizations, these concepts, and these domains 236 00:09:42,508 --> 00:09:43,800 all need to talk to each other. 237 00:09:43,800 --> 00:09:46,350 And you still have a lot of big business 238 00:09:46,350 --> 00:09:48,780 out there and trying to be able to integrate 239 00:09:48,780 --> 00:09:50,910 these very diverse kinds of communities 240 00:09:50,910 --> 00:09:52,650 together within even a single enterprise, 241 00:09:52,650 --> 00:09:54,480 not to mention across enterprises. 242 00:09:54,480 --> 00:09:56,610 And the idea behind using the Semantic Web 243 00:09:56,610 --> 00:09:59,490 is you create a bus basically, a bus that 244 00:09:59,490 --> 00:10:01,890 would allow you to use, based on the standards 245 00:10:01,890 --> 00:10:04,470 in that arrow there, RDF, Resource Description Framework, 246 00:10:04,470 --> 00:10:07,590 OWL, HTTP, and other kinds of standards, 247 00:10:07,590 --> 00:10:12,210 to be able to access a set of all information and data 248 00:10:12,210 --> 00:10:14,880 that are exposed using a common syntax, 249 00:10:14,880 --> 00:10:17,712 and then operate on those things with things like the rule 250 00:10:17,712 --> 00:10:19,170 standards that are being developed, 251 00:10:19,170 --> 00:10:21,670 the query standards that are being developed and so on. 252 00:10:21,670 --> 00:10:24,678 So last slide, there's a number of links 253 00:10:24,678 --> 00:10:26,220 on here to some research efforts that 254 00:10:26,220 --> 00:10:28,020 are going on now in the Semantic Web. 255 00:10:28,020 --> 00:10:31,292 Many of them do apply to some of the domains represented 256 00:10:31,292 --> 00:10:32,250 by people in this room. 257 00:10:32,250 --> 00:10:34,710 And I encourage you to look through some of these links. 258 00:10:34,710 --> 00:10:35,610 Come talk to me. 259 00:10:35,610 --> 00:10:37,050 Come talk to us at the W3C. 260 00:10:37,050 --> 00:10:39,780 And we'd be happy to help you get connected 261 00:10:39,780 --> 00:10:42,300 with other people who may be able to help you 262 00:10:42,300 --> 00:10:43,780 in the research that you're doing. 263 00:10:43,780 --> 00:10:45,492 Thank you very much. 264 00:10:45,492 --> 00:10:49,380 [APPLAUSE] 265 00:10:55,212 --> 00:11:00,332 STEVE MILES: So Bernie Hogan is the CTO of EPCglobal. 266 00:11:00,332 --> 00:11:04,995 BERNIE HOGAN: OK, Steve? 267 00:11:04,995 --> 00:11:07,865 GUEST SPEAKER: Presenting. 268 00:11:07,865 --> 00:11:08,990 BERNIE HOGAN: Good morning. 269 00:11:08,990 --> 00:11:12,950 I, too, would also like to thank John and Stephen for today, 270 00:11:12,950 --> 00:11:14,640 inviting us here today. 271 00:11:14,640 --> 00:11:16,270 Chris Adcock, President of EPCglobal, 272 00:11:16,270 --> 00:11:17,270 wanted to be here today. 273 00:11:17,270 --> 00:11:22,430 But due to scheduling conflicts, he was unable to attend. 274 00:11:22,430 --> 00:11:24,920 But I'd just like to give a little bit different definition 275 00:11:24,920 --> 00:11:26,153 of the EPCglobal network. 276 00:11:26,153 --> 00:11:27,320 I was here to talk about it. 277 00:11:27,320 --> 00:11:30,140 And really, this is what I've learned over four years, what 278 00:11:30,140 --> 00:11:31,970 EPCglobal is about. 279 00:11:31,970 --> 00:11:34,040 Thank you. 280 00:11:34,040 --> 00:11:37,460 And my view of the world is that EPCglobal 281 00:11:37,460 --> 00:11:41,780 is about a network or a community of trading partners 282 00:11:41,780 --> 00:11:46,040 that want to share EPC read events in a standardized way 283 00:11:46,040 --> 00:11:47,840 to improve their business processes. 284 00:11:47,840 --> 00:11:50,690 The technology is important, but it's an enabler. 285 00:11:50,690 --> 00:11:53,720 And if I've learned anything over four years-- 286 00:11:53,720 --> 00:11:55,310 I was looking back over it in order 287 00:11:55,310 --> 00:11:57,680 to prepare this presentation, over the past four years, 288 00:11:57,680 --> 00:12:00,110 and I went back into the archives. 289 00:12:00,110 --> 00:12:04,010 And those of you that are familiar with Tom 290 00:12:04,010 --> 00:12:08,150 Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, OK, well, Sanjay was Tom Sawyer, 291 00:12:08,150 --> 00:12:09,650 and I was Huckleberry Finn. 292 00:12:09,650 --> 00:12:12,680 And I would come up on a regular basis in 2002. 293 00:12:12,680 --> 00:12:14,690 And we would sit in Starbucks Coffee shops 294 00:12:14,690 --> 00:12:16,190 and drink lots of lattes. 295 00:12:16,190 --> 00:12:17,990 And we would draw on napkins. 296 00:12:17,990 --> 00:12:20,660 And he was convincing me how much fun he 297 00:12:20,660 --> 00:12:23,900 was having painting the fence. 298 00:12:23,900 --> 00:12:26,660 And so I bit into it. 299 00:12:26,660 --> 00:12:28,610 And I felt like at right about this time 300 00:12:28,610 --> 00:12:32,960 here, that I grabbed hold of a bullet train, 301 00:12:32,960 --> 00:12:35,180 because there was such tremendous momentum coming out 302 00:12:35,180 --> 00:12:36,410 of the AUTO-ID Center. 303 00:12:36,410 --> 00:12:42,440 And we had no idea what was in store for us. 304 00:12:42,440 --> 00:12:44,870 Coming from the GS1, and EAN, and UCC, 305 00:12:44,870 --> 00:12:48,110 we wanted to look at the next generation of identification. 306 00:12:48,110 --> 00:12:51,240 But we just didn't know it was going to be at this scale. 307 00:12:51,240 --> 00:12:55,130 So these are some slides that I pulled 308 00:12:55,130 --> 00:12:56,870 that were presented to the AUTO-ID Center 309 00:12:56,870 --> 00:12:57,800 Board of Governors. 310 00:12:57,800 --> 00:13:01,970 And this was the transition plan from the AUTO-ID Center. 311 00:13:01,970 --> 00:13:03,860 There was an entity called AUTO-ID, Inc. 312 00:13:03,860 --> 00:13:04,872 at one point in time. 313 00:13:04,872 --> 00:13:06,830 Everyone kind of seems to have forgotten today. 314 00:13:06,830 --> 00:13:09,920 And we're going to migrate to this thing called EPCglobal 315 00:13:09,920 --> 00:13:12,140 with linkage to AUTO-ID Labs. 316 00:13:12,140 --> 00:13:13,950 This was the plan. 317 00:13:13,950 --> 00:13:16,980 We didn't deviate too far from the plan. 318 00:13:16,980 --> 00:13:19,190 Phase one, Sanjay's message to me 319 00:13:19,190 --> 00:13:22,190 was, we've taken this phase of the research just about 320 00:13:22,190 --> 00:13:24,150 as far as we possibly can. 321 00:13:24,150 --> 00:13:25,910 We need to get this into the real world. 322 00:13:25,910 --> 00:13:26,960 We need to get standards. 323 00:13:26,960 --> 00:13:29,450 We need to get companies utilizing this technology 324 00:13:29,450 --> 00:13:31,070 to see what works, what does not work, 325 00:13:31,070 --> 00:13:34,400 and where to take the next iteration of research. 326 00:13:34,400 --> 00:13:36,230 And only through real implementation, 327 00:13:36,230 --> 00:13:38,670 we'll be able to identify and correct the system's issues. 328 00:13:38,670 --> 00:13:40,100 So this was the plan. 329 00:13:40,100 --> 00:13:42,590 Now, you have to remember back then, 330 00:13:42,590 --> 00:13:46,790 UCC and EAN, we were two separate organizations, 331 00:13:46,790 --> 00:13:48,030 not tightly linked. 332 00:13:48,030 --> 00:13:50,347 And there was a long history of constant, 333 00:13:50,347 --> 00:13:52,430 for lack of a better word, battles between the two 334 00:13:52,430 --> 00:13:54,860 organizations, and philosophical issues 335 00:13:54,860 --> 00:13:56,340 on how things should be done. 336 00:13:56,340 --> 00:13:59,330 So UCC and EAN, the agreement was 337 00:13:59,330 --> 00:14:03,320 that UCC would lead the charge and negotiate with MIT 338 00:14:03,320 --> 00:14:04,910 on behalf of this thing. 339 00:14:04,910 --> 00:14:08,730 But MIT was insistent that this be truly global, 340 00:14:08,730 --> 00:14:12,110 not just a US initiative, but also multi-sectoral. 341 00:14:12,110 --> 00:14:13,970 They did not want this to go into-- just 342 00:14:13,970 --> 00:14:17,450 be buried into retail, be the next generation of the UPC. 343 00:14:17,450 --> 00:14:23,617 So these were some very high challenges for us to reach. 344 00:14:23,617 --> 00:14:25,700 And so we worked out the roles and responsibility. 345 00:14:25,700 --> 00:14:27,920 I don't know if you remember these slides, Sanjay. 346 00:14:27,920 --> 00:14:30,450 But we worked out the roles and responsibilities, 347 00:14:30,450 --> 00:14:31,520 who does what. 348 00:14:31,520 --> 00:14:34,640 Well, MIT wanted to continue doing research, development 349 00:14:34,640 --> 00:14:38,420 of new technology, publications, and also 350 00:14:38,420 --> 00:14:43,390 outreach for government funding and working together 351 00:14:43,390 --> 00:14:44,780 on a collaborative way. 352 00:14:44,780 --> 00:14:47,330 UCC and EAN, we were going to do what we did best, 353 00:14:47,330 --> 00:14:49,820 our core competencies, administration of the systems, 354 00:14:49,820 --> 00:14:51,710 commercialization-- key point, OK, 355 00:14:51,710 --> 00:14:54,350 we were going to bring us to the commercial world-- 356 00:14:54,350 --> 00:14:57,170 manage intellectual property if it is manageable, marketing 357 00:14:57,170 --> 00:14:59,587 communications, standards development, and training 358 00:14:59,587 --> 00:15:00,170 and education. 359 00:15:00,170 --> 00:15:02,330 So this is what we laid out. 360 00:15:02,330 --> 00:15:06,560 And this, I lifted it actually from the contract last night. 361 00:15:06,560 --> 00:15:08,390 These were the numbers and the milestones 362 00:15:08,390 --> 00:15:11,930 that we were expected to hit, EAN and UCC. 363 00:15:11,930 --> 00:15:14,930 And I had a very sinking feeling in my stomach at that point 364 00:15:14,930 --> 00:15:18,260 in time because I had to convince my boss at the time 365 00:15:18,260 --> 00:15:19,820 that we needed to do this. 366 00:15:19,820 --> 00:15:21,200 This was the right thing. 367 00:15:21,200 --> 00:15:24,950 And we were signing on behalf of the US and UCC. 368 00:15:24,950 --> 00:15:27,320 And we were supposed to get 20 trading partners 369 00:15:27,320 --> 00:15:30,175 up utilizing EPC in 2004. 370 00:15:30,175 --> 00:15:31,550 And we were also supposed to make 371 00:15:31,550 --> 00:15:36,540 this global and a multi-sectoral approach. 372 00:15:36,540 --> 00:15:37,760 So these were the numbers. 373 00:15:37,760 --> 00:15:40,400 And I was probably never more scared in my life 374 00:15:40,400 --> 00:15:42,980 when I convinced my boss to sign these numbers. 375 00:15:42,980 --> 00:15:44,450 And they looked quite staggering. 376 00:15:44,450 --> 00:15:47,390 So what have we accomplished to date? 377 00:15:47,390 --> 00:15:50,570 Well, EAN and UCC is now under one organization. 378 00:15:50,570 --> 00:15:51,670 We're now GS1. 379 00:15:51,670 --> 00:15:53,340 We work very hard. 380 00:15:53,340 --> 00:15:55,460 We have a common leadership, common approach. 381 00:15:55,460 --> 00:15:56,510 It's now GS1. 382 00:15:56,510 --> 00:15:57,740 So I'm a member. 383 00:15:57,740 --> 00:15:59,930 I work for GS1 US. 384 00:15:59,930 --> 00:16:02,000 There's some other people in the room 385 00:16:02,000 --> 00:16:06,370 here from GS1 other countries around the world. 386 00:16:06,370 --> 00:16:09,780 And we've also aligned our portfolio of standards 387 00:16:09,780 --> 00:16:11,020 and service offerings. 388 00:16:11,020 --> 00:16:16,110 We have four primary service offerings today, the bar codes, 389 00:16:16,110 --> 00:16:18,360 electronic commerce-- it's EDI and XML-- 390 00:16:18,360 --> 00:16:20,160 global data synchronization. 391 00:16:20,160 --> 00:16:24,400 And here I am to talk to you about EPCglobal today. 392 00:16:24,400 --> 00:16:29,400 So the mission, to be true to what MIT wanted us to do, 393 00:16:29,400 --> 00:16:32,310 is just to take a global leadership role in development 394 00:16:32,310 --> 00:16:35,130 and promoting multi-industry, user-driven-- key point, 395 00:16:35,130 --> 00:16:37,860 user-driven, because if this is not relevant to the user, 396 00:16:37,860 --> 00:16:39,300 it will not have impact. 397 00:16:39,300 --> 00:16:40,800 If you've been involved in standards 398 00:16:40,800 --> 00:16:42,900 processes before, if you don't get 399 00:16:42,900 --> 00:16:44,670 the support of the industry, you will not 400 00:16:44,670 --> 00:16:45,940 get the implementation. 401 00:16:45,940 --> 00:16:48,770 So we keep on holding back to what the users want, and then 402 00:16:48,770 --> 00:16:49,770 we develop the standard. 403 00:16:49,770 --> 00:16:52,410 Building standards for the sake of building standards' sake 404 00:16:52,410 --> 00:16:54,310 is not interesting. 405 00:16:54,310 --> 00:16:56,485 We wanted to deliver added value to our customers 406 00:16:56,485 --> 00:16:58,110 and stakeholders through our activities 407 00:16:58,110 --> 00:17:00,750 and drive it through the GS1 member organizations. 408 00:17:00,750 --> 00:17:03,900 There are 102 GS1 member organizations 409 00:17:03,900 --> 00:17:05,710 around the world today. 410 00:17:05,710 --> 00:17:07,200 We want to be the trusted authority 411 00:17:07,200 --> 00:17:08,760 on technical standards. 412 00:17:08,760 --> 00:17:11,250 We're not a technical development organization. 413 00:17:11,250 --> 00:17:13,440 Technology is an enabler, but we want 414 00:17:13,440 --> 00:17:16,170 to provide the forum where the technologists can 415 00:17:16,170 --> 00:17:18,720 sit at the table and work on standards 416 00:17:18,720 --> 00:17:21,480 through our processes, and to effectively 417 00:17:21,480 --> 00:17:22,720 manage public policy. 418 00:17:22,720 --> 00:17:24,900 Public policy, what we learn from AUTO-ID Center, 419 00:17:24,900 --> 00:17:27,270 is probably as important as anything we do, 420 00:17:27,270 --> 00:17:29,520 because if this is not accepted by the consumer, 421 00:17:29,520 --> 00:17:33,150 it's not accepted by the legislators, this will not fly. 422 00:17:33,150 --> 00:17:34,440 It will not move forward. 423 00:17:34,440 --> 00:17:38,410 And we have a lot of activities in that area of public policy. 424 00:17:38,410 --> 00:17:39,500 So where do we stand? 425 00:17:39,500 --> 00:17:42,150 You remember the other numbers I put before? 426 00:17:42,150 --> 00:17:45,090 It shows the amount of growth around the world 427 00:17:45,090 --> 00:17:46,770 and the breakdown by region. 428 00:17:46,770 --> 00:17:50,227 Well, we far exceeded our expectations. 429 00:17:50,227 --> 00:17:51,810 And now we have a different challenge. 430 00:17:51,810 --> 00:17:52,860 It's community management. 431 00:17:52,860 --> 00:17:54,350 How do we manage these communities? 432 00:17:54,350 --> 00:17:58,500 But globally, as of January, we have 733 trading partners 433 00:17:58,500 --> 00:17:59,917 around the world. 434 00:17:59,917 --> 00:18:01,500 The most unbelievable amount of growth 435 00:18:01,500 --> 00:18:03,300 is coming from the Asia region. 436 00:18:03,300 --> 00:18:04,830 There's government-funded projects 437 00:18:04,830 --> 00:18:08,850 in the Asia region in Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, and Korea. 438 00:18:08,850 --> 00:18:10,140 They're coming on very strong. 439 00:18:10,140 --> 00:18:12,640 And people-- not only do they want to build this technology, 440 00:18:12,640 --> 00:18:15,540 but they also want to improve their business processing 441 00:18:15,540 --> 00:18:16,710 leveraging this technology. 442 00:18:16,710 --> 00:18:19,680 So it's quite rewarding to where we are. 443 00:18:19,680 --> 00:18:24,480 You can see in two years where we've come 444 00:18:24,480 --> 00:18:26,020 in a very short period of time. 445 00:18:26,020 --> 00:18:29,460 And you can see the percentages and the breakdowns 446 00:18:29,460 --> 00:18:33,060 by region and the amount of growth around the world. 447 00:18:33,060 --> 00:18:35,340 This is very encouraging. 448 00:18:35,340 --> 00:18:36,940 And it's a lot of hard work. 449 00:18:36,940 --> 00:18:39,000 But we want to get back to our mission. 450 00:18:39,000 --> 00:18:41,580 Initially, what was in the AUTO-ID Center, 451 00:18:41,580 --> 00:18:44,440 there was a majority of-- 452 00:18:44,440 --> 00:18:46,663 well, a large portion of the companies 453 00:18:46,663 --> 00:18:48,330 that were involved in the AUTO-ID Center 454 00:18:48,330 --> 00:18:49,330 were solution providers. 455 00:18:49,330 --> 00:18:51,090 They were looking for the new, new thing. 456 00:18:51,090 --> 00:18:52,890 They were looking for the next opportunity. 457 00:18:52,890 --> 00:18:55,560 They wanted to build the marketplace, which 458 00:18:55,560 --> 00:18:57,970 is very important and continues to be important. 459 00:18:57,970 --> 00:19:00,340 But if we're going to be relevant to the marketplace, 460 00:19:00,340 --> 00:19:02,920 we need the involvement of the end users. 461 00:19:02,920 --> 00:19:07,140 And so you can see, as of the latter part of last year, 462 00:19:07,140 --> 00:19:10,590 we have 53% of our total membership is end users. 463 00:19:10,590 --> 00:19:13,530 A great industry support, some of the companies in the room, 464 00:19:13,530 --> 00:19:17,880 Walmart, Target, Albertsons, Department of Defense, Metro, 465 00:19:17,880 --> 00:19:19,450 Tesco, so on and so forth. 466 00:19:19,450 --> 00:19:22,020 And we're also getting support outside 467 00:19:22,020 --> 00:19:24,750 of the traditional retail sectors. 468 00:19:24,750 --> 00:19:28,320 So this is coming to true. 469 00:19:28,320 --> 00:19:32,477 Getting back to the multi-sectoral approach, 470 00:19:32,477 --> 00:19:33,310 this is a breakdown. 471 00:19:33,310 --> 00:19:36,130 This is a US perspective, but it shows 472 00:19:36,130 --> 00:19:37,690 across the industry sectors. 473 00:19:37,690 --> 00:19:40,540 Not only is it just consumer goods, food and beverage, 474 00:19:40,540 --> 00:19:42,790 health care life sciences. 475 00:19:42,790 --> 00:19:45,160 There's a great balance across these communities. 476 00:19:45,160 --> 00:19:47,680 And what they're now finding, these communities, they all 477 00:19:47,680 --> 00:19:49,720 start as separate groups where they all want 478 00:19:49,720 --> 00:19:51,130 to talk about their problems. 479 00:19:51,130 --> 00:19:52,990 But they start to cross-pollinate 480 00:19:52,990 --> 00:19:53,740 with one another. 481 00:19:53,740 --> 00:19:57,460 And they say some of their problems are the same. 482 00:19:57,460 --> 00:20:00,110 And there's good interaction. 483 00:20:00,110 --> 00:20:04,720 We have a structure in place and a governance structure. 484 00:20:04,720 --> 00:20:06,825 But it really starts with a business problem. 485 00:20:06,825 --> 00:20:08,200 The Business Steering Committees, 486 00:20:08,200 --> 00:20:10,780 we organize the communities around Business Action Groups. 487 00:20:10,780 --> 00:20:13,060 We have a Consumer Packaged Good, Health Care Life 488 00:20:13,060 --> 00:20:15,265 Sciences, and we recently launched a Transportation 489 00:20:15,265 --> 00:20:17,470 and Logistics. 490 00:20:17,470 --> 00:20:20,650 There's regional adoption programs in Europe and Asia. 491 00:20:20,650 --> 00:20:23,740 And now we have some discussion groups 492 00:20:23,740 --> 00:20:26,458 in aerospace, food and beverage, automotive, and apparel. 493 00:20:26,458 --> 00:20:28,750 So eventually, these will become Business Action Groups 494 00:20:28,750 --> 00:20:29,990 as we move forward. 495 00:20:29,990 --> 00:20:32,540 So the structure is in place. 496 00:20:32,540 --> 00:20:35,710 We have a continuous improvement process to organize things. 497 00:20:35,710 --> 00:20:39,730 It's great challenge, but it's a great thing to be involved. 498 00:20:39,730 --> 00:20:42,640 Here's the standards process, where 499 00:20:42,640 --> 00:20:44,140 we are to date with the standards 500 00:20:44,140 --> 00:20:47,595 and what have been delivered as far as the specifications, what 501 00:20:47,595 --> 00:20:48,970 have been ratified by the boards. 502 00:20:48,970 --> 00:20:53,210 We have ONS, ALE, or Filtering and Collection, Tag Data 503 00:20:53,210 --> 00:20:53,710 Standards. 504 00:20:53,710 --> 00:20:56,830 We have several generations of that specification 505 00:20:56,830 --> 00:20:58,840 and, of course, Gen2. 506 00:20:58,840 --> 00:21:01,420 But the most important part of and the real value 507 00:21:01,420 --> 00:21:06,700 of a standard is what occurs in the certification process. 508 00:21:06,700 --> 00:21:08,980 Last September, we announced the certification 509 00:21:08,980 --> 00:21:11,290 of Gen2 interoperable products, which 510 00:21:11,290 --> 00:21:13,090 tags work with which readers. 511 00:21:13,090 --> 00:21:17,240 Or better yet, which ones conform to the specifications. 512 00:21:17,240 --> 00:21:19,450 Now as a result of that, you're seeing 513 00:21:19,450 --> 00:21:22,090 prices starting to drop significantly, 514 00:21:22,090 --> 00:21:23,150 and we're moving forward. 515 00:21:23,150 --> 00:21:25,608 So we're building a marketplace for the solution providers. 516 00:21:25,608 --> 00:21:28,450 And we're building opportunity for trading partners that 517 00:21:28,450 --> 00:21:30,670 give them freedom of choice on which solutions 518 00:21:30,670 --> 00:21:33,220 they wish to procure. 519 00:21:33,220 --> 00:21:34,690 We have a governance structure that 520 00:21:34,690 --> 00:21:36,235 is balanced and across the sectors. 521 00:21:36,235 --> 00:21:37,360 Not only do we have retail. 522 00:21:37,360 --> 00:21:40,180 We have transportation and logistics, health care, 523 00:21:40,180 --> 00:21:41,950 technology, public sectors. 524 00:21:41,950 --> 00:21:43,960 We have regional balance globally 525 00:21:43,960 --> 00:21:48,670 from Latin America, Europe, and the Far East. 526 00:21:48,670 --> 00:21:50,830 Sanjay serves on the Board of Governors 527 00:21:50,830 --> 00:21:52,510 providing linkage back to labs. 528 00:21:52,510 --> 00:21:55,632 And we have a couple other sectors 529 00:21:55,632 --> 00:21:57,590 that have come on board-- consumer electronics, 530 00:21:57,590 --> 00:21:58,465 as well as aerospace. 531 00:21:58,465 --> 00:22:02,530 And the Board will expand depending on industry activity. 532 00:22:02,530 --> 00:22:04,540 I want to commend Elgar, and John, 533 00:22:04,540 --> 00:22:06,550 and Nick Ferguson up top for the work 534 00:22:06,550 --> 00:22:08,170 that they've done in the last years. 535 00:22:08,170 --> 00:22:10,060 I mean, if there's any area that we 536 00:22:10,060 --> 00:22:11,965 could have improved over the past two years, 537 00:22:11,965 --> 00:22:14,110 it was the linkage to the labs. 538 00:22:14,110 --> 00:22:18,850 I mean, EPCglobal had challenges, startup issues. 539 00:22:18,850 --> 00:22:20,800 The labs they had were-- 540 00:22:20,800 --> 00:22:23,690 there was a change in role and how things work. 541 00:22:23,690 --> 00:22:26,345 I think we're on a great course now with the new structure. 542 00:22:26,345 --> 00:22:31,630 I commend the work that's been done to date in that arena. 543 00:22:31,630 --> 00:22:34,000 We've created better linkage between the labs 544 00:22:34,000 --> 00:22:35,260 and the research. 545 00:22:35,260 --> 00:22:37,920 These are some leadership roles that Sanjay 546 00:22:37,920 --> 00:22:40,420 serves on the Board of Governors and the Architecture Review 547 00:22:40,420 --> 00:22:40,990 Committee. 548 00:22:40,990 --> 00:22:44,680 John Williams also serves on the member of the ARC. 549 00:22:44,680 --> 00:22:47,290 Elgar serves on the Business Steering Committee. 550 00:22:47,290 --> 00:22:51,460 Also, some of the other research members, Peter and Dan, 551 00:22:51,460 --> 00:22:54,310 Peter Cole and Dan Engels, the active members of The Hague. 552 00:22:54,310 --> 00:22:56,260 And other members of the research community 553 00:22:56,260 --> 00:22:58,060 are participating in this thing, but we 554 00:22:58,060 --> 00:23:01,240 need to align this better going forward. 555 00:23:01,240 --> 00:23:02,630 It's a great opportunity. 556 00:23:02,630 --> 00:23:04,780 And as this academic alliance comes together, 557 00:23:04,780 --> 00:23:08,080 we need to extend the outreach. 558 00:23:08,080 --> 00:23:10,780 Looking into the future, well, my list isn't too far from 559 00:23:10,780 --> 00:23:12,100 Sanjay's. 560 00:23:12,100 --> 00:23:14,000 And we both did this independently. 561 00:23:14,000 --> 00:23:17,505 So business justification, return on investment. 562 00:23:17,505 --> 00:23:18,880 There's a lot of trading partners 563 00:23:18,880 --> 00:23:21,798 that are still struggling with trying to find the value 564 00:23:21,798 --> 00:23:22,840 and return on investment. 565 00:23:22,840 --> 00:23:24,640 There are trading partners that get it, 566 00:23:24,640 --> 00:23:27,015 and there are trading partners that are still struggling. 567 00:23:27,015 --> 00:23:30,250 Huge research opportunity to help them find the way. 568 00:23:30,250 --> 00:23:35,380 Business use cases, they need to have clarity to do that. 569 00:23:35,380 --> 00:23:38,770 Information sharing, I think, is one of our biggest challenges, 570 00:23:38,770 --> 00:23:41,470 information sharing because there's proprietary solutions. 571 00:23:41,470 --> 00:23:45,040 Many of the retailers today have their own proprietary portals. 572 00:23:45,040 --> 00:23:48,130 And getting them to embrace an open standard 573 00:23:48,130 --> 00:23:49,120 will be a challenge. 574 00:23:49,120 --> 00:23:50,470 You have legacy constraints. 575 00:23:50,470 --> 00:23:53,500 People have large investments in EDI and other systems. 576 00:23:53,500 --> 00:23:56,452 Lack of trust, getting trading partners to trust. 577 00:23:56,452 --> 00:23:58,160 I don't know if this is a research topic. 578 00:23:58,160 --> 00:24:00,035 I don't know how to get past the trust issue, 579 00:24:00,035 --> 00:24:04,000 but it is probably our biggest challenge right now. 580 00:24:04,000 --> 00:24:06,550 Inertia is another challenge. 581 00:24:06,550 --> 00:24:09,310 "We've always done it this way," is what we hear, 582 00:24:09,310 --> 00:24:11,740 and getting people past that model. 583 00:24:11,740 --> 00:24:13,780 There's also existing revenue models 584 00:24:13,780 --> 00:24:16,270 in place in health care, life sciences, 585 00:24:16,270 --> 00:24:18,610 and fast-moving consumer goods. 586 00:24:18,610 --> 00:24:20,745 People sell information to one another. 587 00:24:20,745 --> 00:24:22,300 Well, if you create an open standard 588 00:24:22,300 --> 00:24:24,040 to share information over the internet, 589 00:24:24,040 --> 00:24:25,240 what happens to the revenue? 590 00:24:25,240 --> 00:24:26,250 We have to deal with it. 591 00:24:26,250 --> 00:24:27,960 Nobody wants to talk about that, but it's 592 00:24:27,960 --> 00:24:30,520 a reality what we have today. 593 00:24:30,520 --> 00:24:32,670 It's somewhat the elephant in the room. 594 00:24:32,670 --> 00:24:34,620 What we need is unbiased research 595 00:24:34,620 --> 00:24:36,060 on alternative technologies. 596 00:24:36,060 --> 00:24:38,670 I've been approached no less than three times 597 00:24:38,670 --> 00:24:42,090 from alternative technology companies and saying, 598 00:24:42,090 --> 00:24:47,310 I have the technology that will go past Gen2. 599 00:24:47,310 --> 00:24:49,890 But we cannot have a single vendor solution. 600 00:24:49,890 --> 00:24:53,340 We need unbiased research to go look at these technologies 601 00:24:53,340 --> 00:24:55,950 and come back and help show a way. 602 00:24:55,950 --> 00:24:57,870 Security, you could have put a whole slide 603 00:24:57,870 --> 00:25:01,710 on security, encryption, authentication, password 604 00:25:01,710 --> 00:25:03,780 management. 605 00:25:03,780 --> 00:25:05,250 The list goes on around security. 606 00:25:05,250 --> 00:25:06,450 It's such a broad topic. 607 00:25:06,450 --> 00:25:08,670 Sensors, active tags. 608 00:25:08,670 --> 00:25:11,130 Intellectual property, how do you deal with it? 609 00:25:11,130 --> 00:25:13,320 We're dealing quite a bit with defensive patents 610 00:25:13,320 --> 00:25:16,785 today or, use my words, nuisance patents. 611 00:25:16,785 --> 00:25:18,160 But we need to work through that. 612 00:25:18,160 --> 00:25:21,120 We're not about companies that truly have an invention 613 00:25:21,120 --> 00:25:23,017 that they want to protect. 614 00:25:23,017 --> 00:25:24,600 But a lot of the intellectual property 615 00:25:24,600 --> 00:25:27,810 issues we deal with are just, in my opinion, frivolous 616 00:25:27,810 --> 00:25:29,520 and as well as public policies. 617 00:25:29,520 --> 00:25:34,955 And these are all opportunities for research to move forward. 618 00:25:34,955 --> 00:25:37,770 In summary and conclusion, the community, 619 00:25:37,770 --> 00:25:40,203 we've moved from hope, to hype, to implementation. 620 00:25:40,203 --> 00:25:41,370 There are deployments there. 621 00:25:41,370 --> 00:25:43,980 You can read the reports on what's happening. 622 00:25:43,980 --> 00:25:46,770 The community grows stronger every day. 623 00:25:46,770 --> 00:25:48,750 It's getting more complex. 624 00:25:48,750 --> 00:25:52,133 When you look at the numbers, it's only-- we have over 700. 625 00:25:52,133 --> 00:25:53,050 It's quite staggering. 626 00:25:53,050 --> 00:25:56,910 How do you organize 1,500 people around the world 627 00:25:56,910 --> 00:25:58,290 to develop standards? 628 00:25:58,290 --> 00:26:01,080 These are challenges, but I think we're up to the task. 629 00:26:01,080 --> 00:26:06,450 Physics and standards challenges are being overcome. 630 00:26:06,450 --> 00:26:07,990 Prices are coming down. 631 00:26:07,990 --> 00:26:10,950 The benefits of visibility are starting to be realized. 632 00:26:10,950 --> 00:26:15,660 We need to get more public facts about these business benefits. 633 00:26:15,660 --> 00:26:18,990 But the community has moved decisively forward 634 00:26:18,990 --> 00:26:20,890 from preparation to implementation. 635 00:26:20,890 --> 00:26:22,640 So the companies that are involved, 636 00:26:22,640 --> 00:26:23,790 they see the opportunity. 637 00:26:23,790 --> 00:26:26,460 And they're off to the race for business benefits. 638 00:26:26,460 --> 00:26:28,710 We need to get the research community involved 639 00:26:28,710 --> 00:26:32,160 to bring in more people, get this technology to everyone 640 00:26:32,160 --> 00:26:33,100 on a global basis. 641 00:26:33,100 --> 00:26:34,135 Thank you very much. 642 00:26:34,135 --> 00:26:37,460 [APPLAUSE] 643 00:26:39,835 --> 00:26:42,010 STEVE MILES: And then John Williams, 644 00:26:42,010 --> 00:26:43,970 the Director of the AUTO-ID Labs here. 645 00:27:21,224 --> 00:27:22,570 JOHN WILLIAMS: Great. 646 00:27:22,570 --> 00:27:25,120 Thanks so much, Steve. 647 00:27:25,120 --> 00:27:28,210 This is a little like being in a car race here. 648 00:27:28,210 --> 00:27:33,070 I feel I've got about 3 minutes to present 85 slides. 649 00:27:33,070 --> 00:27:38,550 No, let me start zipping through these. 650 00:27:38,550 --> 00:27:43,010 Sanjay got me interested in RFID about a year ago. 651 00:27:43,010 --> 00:27:45,780 My background is not in RFID. 652 00:27:45,780 --> 00:27:49,410 Before this, I built information systems. 653 00:27:49,410 --> 00:27:51,750 So I'm coming to things from the point of view of, 654 00:27:51,750 --> 00:27:57,700 how do you build systems that are globally sustainable? 655 00:27:57,700 --> 00:28:03,090 And I think there's some very interesting things happening 656 00:28:03,090 --> 00:28:04,920 at the moment in the world, certainly 657 00:28:04,920 --> 00:28:08,200 in the world of software, that things are changing yet again. 658 00:28:08,200 --> 00:28:11,130 We had the internet revolution. 659 00:28:11,130 --> 00:28:15,990 Recently, Bill Gates and one of his VPs, Ray Ozzie, 660 00:28:15,990 --> 00:28:19,170 sent out a memo-- it was October 30, 2005-- 661 00:28:19,170 --> 00:28:23,540 sent out a memo saying, guys, the world has changed again. 662 00:28:23,540 --> 00:28:26,930 We've got the internet happening yet again. 663 00:28:26,930 --> 00:28:28,310 They were blindsided. 664 00:28:28,310 --> 00:28:31,400 Microsoft were blindsided in the '90s by the internet. 665 00:28:31,400 --> 00:28:32,820 Now something else is happening. 666 00:28:32,820 --> 00:28:35,030 And it's this world of services. 667 00:28:35,030 --> 00:28:37,460 They're very afraid that Google has 668 00:28:37,460 --> 00:28:41,720 a totally different business model to providing services. 669 00:28:41,720 --> 00:28:45,800 And I just want to say how Google's model actually impacts 670 00:28:45,800 --> 00:28:48,500 RFID, because I think it's interesting 671 00:28:48,500 --> 00:28:52,070 when you think about what happens when 672 00:28:52,070 --> 00:28:54,290 you know where everything is. 673 00:28:54,290 --> 00:28:56,780 And I think that's what's happening with RFID. 674 00:28:56,780 --> 00:28:58,670 We have the ability to know where 675 00:28:58,670 --> 00:29:02,770 a good portion of the physical things in the world are. 676 00:29:02,770 --> 00:29:05,470 And what happens to business models then? 677 00:29:05,470 --> 00:29:10,060 And Sanjay was intimating that, yeah, it's 678 00:29:10,060 --> 00:29:11,710 going to change the way we do business. 679 00:29:11,710 --> 00:29:14,250 And I'd just like to add to that thought because I think 680 00:29:14,250 --> 00:29:15,610 it really is going to happen. 681 00:29:15,610 --> 00:29:18,550 It is happening. 682 00:29:18,550 --> 00:29:19,660 My background is software. 683 00:29:19,660 --> 00:29:22,780 I'd like to say something about software trends. 684 00:29:22,780 --> 00:29:26,350 Security is a major problem. 685 00:29:26,350 --> 00:29:27,850 There was a recent report. 686 00:29:27,850 --> 00:29:34,300 It's the fastest-growing area, business area, is fraud. 687 00:29:34,300 --> 00:29:37,240 If you want to get into a good area, 688 00:29:37,240 --> 00:29:38,890 fraud is a great area at the moment. 689 00:29:38,890 --> 00:29:42,610 It's growing at about 1,000% a year. 690 00:29:42,610 --> 00:29:44,020 I was talking to Hao Min. 691 00:29:44,020 --> 00:29:47,500 And he was saying that The Hague was recently hacked 692 00:29:47,500 --> 00:29:50,620 like yesterday, that adverts were being sent out 693 00:29:50,620 --> 00:29:52,330 over the email list. 694 00:29:52,330 --> 00:29:53,860 This is a serious trend. 695 00:29:53,860 --> 00:29:58,890 The internet was not designed with security in mind. 696 00:29:58,890 --> 00:30:00,390 We can see that we're probably going 697 00:30:00,390 --> 00:30:02,837 to have to be secure, that we can't allow people to see 698 00:30:02,837 --> 00:30:04,920 the drugs in our pocket or that you're walking out 699 00:30:04,920 --> 00:30:11,340 of a store with OxyContin or whatever it is. 700 00:30:11,340 --> 00:30:13,893 The other thing I'd like to note is that change, 701 00:30:13,893 --> 00:30:15,060 we have to build for change. 702 00:30:15,060 --> 00:30:16,643 One thing we've learned about software 703 00:30:16,643 --> 00:30:19,830 is we can't expect people to follow a standard rigidly. 704 00:30:19,830 --> 00:30:23,460 You can't force people into adopting a standard that's 705 00:30:23,460 --> 00:30:24,750 going to stay static. 706 00:30:24,750 --> 00:30:27,455 We're going to have standards that are changing. 707 00:30:27,455 --> 00:30:28,830 And that's going to be a problem. 708 00:30:28,830 --> 00:30:31,800 We have to design for that. 709 00:30:31,800 --> 00:30:37,220 So we've got a system that's global. 710 00:30:37,220 --> 00:30:40,648 This was some work we did on incorporating Google Maps 711 00:30:40,648 --> 00:30:41,690 so that we could zoom in. 712 00:30:41,690 --> 00:30:45,410 We could type in EPC code in and zoom in 713 00:30:45,410 --> 00:30:48,080 down through the layers of aerial photographs 714 00:30:48,080 --> 00:30:53,930 into a store, onto the shop shelf in the shop. 715 00:30:53,930 --> 00:30:54,890 That's possible now. 716 00:30:54,890 --> 00:30:58,010 We can integrate information systems 717 00:30:58,010 --> 00:30:59,890 that it's distributed across the globe. 718 00:31:02,373 --> 00:31:03,790 Now, I think the interesting thing 719 00:31:03,790 --> 00:31:06,880 is that that allows different business models. 720 00:31:06,880 --> 00:31:11,510 As I said, Google is a phenomena that we're only 721 00:31:11,510 --> 00:31:13,340 just beginning to understand. 722 00:31:13,340 --> 00:31:15,140 I don't know if you've heard about AdWords, 723 00:31:15,140 --> 00:31:20,180 but it's a $6 billion industry at $0.50 a shot. 724 00:31:20,180 --> 00:31:21,380 So what they're doing-- 725 00:31:21,380 --> 00:31:23,930 this is one of Google's products-- 726 00:31:23,930 --> 00:31:26,090 that what they're trying to do is 727 00:31:26,090 --> 00:31:29,330 make anyone can buy and sell anything. 728 00:31:29,330 --> 00:31:31,550 They're matching up search queries 729 00:31:31,550 --> 00:31:33,680 with hundreds of thousands of marketers, 730 00:31:33,680 --> 00:31:36,440 these people on eBay selling things 731 00:31:36,440 --> 00:31:38,450 that they'll match them up. 732 00:31:38,450 --> 00:31:40,490 And they do it in a fraction of a second. 733 00:31:40,490 --> 00:31:42,890 And they do it with a very different software 734 00:31:42,890 --> 00:31:43,790 architecture. 735 00:31:43,790 --> 00:31:45,440 They don't use databases. 736 00:31:45,440 --> 00:31:46,850 They have everything in memory. 737 00:31:46,850 --> 00:31:48,590 Everything is cached. 738 00:31:48,590 --> 00:31:51,710 They have something like 500,000 machines at the moment. 739 00:31:51,710 --> 00:31:54,440 Nobody knows exactly how many. 740 00:31:54,440 --> 00:31:57,830 But they're not using relational databases. 741 00:31:57,830 --> 00:31:59,460 They have a very different approach. 742 00:31:59,460 --> 00:32:01,543 I don't know if you've typed something in and made 743 00:32:01,543 --> 00:32:03,570 a mistake in Google. 744 00:32:03,570 --> 00:32:06,570 And they suggest what the correction should be. 745 00:32:06,570 --> 00:32:09,480 And they don't do it based on dictionaries. 746 00:32:09,480 --> 00:32:12,000 What they do, they do it just based on the fact 747 00:32:12,000 --> 00:32:14,370 that somebody else has made that mistake before. 748 00:32:14,370 --> 00:32:18,570 They've recorded it, and they've recorded it what 749 00:32:18,570 --> 00:32:20,650 you're likely to type in next. 750 00:32:20,650 --> 00:32:24,210 So they have a very different kind of set of algorithms 751 00:32:24,210 --> 00:32:25,350 to normal. 752 00:32:25,350 --> 00:32:27,660 And Eric Schmidt, who is the CEO of Google, 753 00:32:27,660 --> 00:32:31,530 wants to match every single item in the world to a buyer. 754 00:32:31,530 --> 00:32:33,690 This sounds very much like RFID to me, 755 00:32:33,690 --> 00:32:37,680 that you need to know where are those items, who 756 00:32:37,680 --> 00:32:40,950 do they belong to, et cetera. 757 00:32:40,950 --> 00:32:43,380 So I think there's going to be a lot of research 758 00:32:43,380 --> 00:32:47,670 in integrating services. 759 00:32:47,670 --> 00:32:51,270 The EPC codes are going to be a critical part of that, 760 00:32:51,270 --> 00:32:54,000 but then we're going to add other data in. 761 00:32:54,000 --> 00:32:56,670 And we're already beginning to see some of the issues 762 00:32:56,670 --> 00:33:00,960 that that causes with data coming up through-- we've 763 00:33:00,960 --> 00:33:03,780 got through EPCglobal. 764 00:33:03,780 --> 00:33:08,940 We've got standards up to about this EPCIS level. 765 00:33:08,940 --> 00:33:11,720 So this is dealing with EPC reads. 766 00:33:11,720 --> 00:33:13,640 Now, above that, we've got things 767 00:33:13,640 --> 00:33:17,150 like search and discovery, discovery services. 768 00:33:17,150 --> 00:33:21,690 We're unsure what those are, and we need to define them. 769 00:33:21,690 --> 00:33:27,560 So this whole layer above ONS, above EPCIS, we really 770 00:33:27,560 --> 00:33:30,050 need to think seriously about. 771 00:33:30,050 --> 00:33:33,170 That will involve feeding in other data, 772 00:33:33,170 --> 00:33:35,570 matching it with these EPC reads. 773 00:33:35,570 --> 00:33:38,210 So at the moment, we're thinking about, OK, this 774 00:33:38,210 --> 00:33:40,760 will be data from the ERP systems. 775 00:33:40,760 --> 00:33:46,070 But it may be data from Google Maps, other databases, 776 00:33:46,070 --> 00:33:49,830 from government databases for example. 777 00:33:49,830 --> 00:33:54,740 So we're trying to build a simulator in the AUTO-ID Labs 778 00:33:54,740 --> 00:33:57,300 to understand what this global network is going to be like. 779 00:33:57,300 --> 00:34:00,830 We feel that we need to simulate it to get some idea of where 780 00:34:00,830 --> 00:34:06,740 the bottlenecks are going to be, what the research that's going 781 00:34:06,740 --> 00:34:08,360 to be needed. 782 00:34:08,360 --> 00:34:11,190 We don't know where this data is going to reside. 783 00:34:11,190 --> 00:34:14,839 The EPC reads, are they going to be pushed way up beyond EPCIS? 784 00:34:14,839 --> 00:34:18,858 Are they going to reside below the EPCIS layer? 785 00:34:18,858 --> 00:34:20,900 It's unclear how much data is going to be flowing 786 00:34:20,900 --> 00:34:23,330 or where it's going to be. 787 00:34:23,330 --> 00:34:28,429 So at the moment, we're defining this architecture. 788 00:34:28,429 --> 00:34:30,635 A lot of the standards for the middleware-- 789 00:34:30,635 --> 00:34:32,210 and when I talk about middleware, 790 00:34:32,210 --> 00:34:35,960 I'm talking about middleware, the TCP/IP and above level, 791 00:34:35,960 --> 00:34:40,550 not the middleware between the reader and the tag. 792 00:34:40,550 --> 00:34:42,530 And I think we're already beginning 793 00:34:42,530 --> 00:34:48,409 to see there's some confusion about the use of words, 794 00:34:48,409 --> 00:34:50,540 of semantics, things like discovery. 795 00:34:50,540 --> 00:34:53,389 For us in the Web service world, discovery mechanisms 796 00:34:53,389 --> 00:34:56,510 means something different to discovery, I think, 797 00:34:56,510 --> 00:34:58,360 in the EPC context. 798 00:34:58,360 --> 00:35:01,663 So we're going to need to sort out some of these dictionaries. 799 00:35:01,663 --> 00:35:03,080 So some of the issues that I think 800 00:35:03,080 --> 00:35:06,520 are important, one of the most important 801 00:35:06,520 --> 00:35:08,430 is security, for sure, that we've 802 00:35:08,430 --> 00:35:10,600 got to figure out how to secure these systems. 803 00:35:10,600 --> 00:35:13,450 And it's not so much a-- it's a technical problem, 804 00:35:13,450 --> 00:35:15,180 but it's at all layers. 805 00:35:15,180 --> 00:35:21,210 You can't just secure the tag to the reader, that at some level, 806 00:35:21,210 --> 00:35:24,600 security is about risk management, 807 00:35:24,600 --> 00:35:28,520 that you can provide a very, very secure system, 808 00:35:28,520 --> 00:35:31,020 but it means that you're not connected to the outside world. 809 00:35:31,020 --> 00:35:32,700 This is what the National Labs do. 810 00:35:32,700 --> 00:35:35,340 They just disconnect themselves from the internet. 811 00:35:35,340 --> 00:35:37,750 If you're connected to the internet, 812 00:35:37,750 --> 00:35:40,170 you're going to have to do some kind of risk management. 813 00:35:40,170 --> 00:35:42,180 And that means that you have to know who's 814 00:35:42,180 --> 00:35:44,100 taking what responsibility. 815 00:35:44,100 --> 00:35:48,450 And we don't have that defined at the moment. 816 00:35:48,450 --> 00:35:50,250 Brian has been doing a lot of research 817 00:35:50,250 --> 00:35:53,280 in how the legal issues are going 818 00:35:53,280 --> 00:35:56,430 to be resolved with RFID, of ownership 819 00:35:56,430 --> 00:36:00,130 and how that's transferred. 820 00:36:00,130 --> 00:36:04,150 So the security issue, I feel, needs to be addressed. 821 00:36:04,150 --> 00:36:07,840 It's a systems problem and that we have to view it that way. 822 00:36:07,840 --> 00:36:10,920 We're going to need to understand the business 823 00:36:10,920 --> 00:36:15,240 drivers, the software, and the hardware. 824 00:36:15,240 --> 00:36:18,000 Scalability and robustness, as I say, 825 00:36:18,000 --> 00:36:21,070 Google are building global systems. 826 00:36:21,070 --> 00:36:24,960 And to do that, you have to look at how you scale. 827 00:36:24,960 --> 00:36:27,300 You have to scale. 828 00:36:27,300 --> 00:36:29,040 There's this order n. 829 00:36:29,040 --> 00:36:33,480 As n increases, you better not be n squared or analog n. 830 00:36:33,480 --> 00:36:36,570 It's not going to work. 831 00:36:36,570 --> 00:36:40,020 Caching is going to be a real issue, 832 00:36:40,020 --> 00:36:43,860 that we were talking to people in warehouse management. 833 00:36:43,860 --> 00:36:47,310 And they were saying that they need response times of way 834 00:36:47,310 --> 00:36:48,063 under a second. 835 00:36:48,063 --> 00:36:49,980 So that means you can't go out to the internet 836 00:36:49,980 --> 00:36:50,872 to get something. 837 00:36:50,872 --> 00:36:52,830 They're down to like one hundredth of a second, 838 00:36:52,830 --> 00:36:55,050 that they've got conveyor belts running. 839 00:36:55,050 --> 00:36:58,200 They need to know what this item is, how big is it, 840 00:36:58,200 --> 00:36:59,830 what's it made of, et cetera. 841 00:36:59,830 --> 00:37:01,080 And you need that immediately. 842 00:37:01,080 --> 00:37:02,747 So you're going to have to cache things. 843 00:37:02,747 --> 00:37:04,380 Caching, I don't know if you ever 844 00:37:04,380 --> 00:37:08,550 tried to do kind of delete what's cached in your computer 845 00:37:08,550 --> 00:37:10,080 or in your browser. 846 00:37:10,080 --> 00:37:13,860 It's difficult. Shooting down caches is difficult. 847 00:37:13,860 --> 00:37:16,980 You've got multiple levels of caching. 848 00:37:16,980 --> 00:37:20,230 And it's not easy to keep that consistent. 849 00:37:20,230 --> 00:37:22,890 And so the kinds of systems that we're going to be looking at, 850 00:37:22,890 --> 00:37:26,243 I think, are not going to be the traditional database systems. 851 00:37:26,243 --> 00:37:27,660 We're going to have to be thinking 852 00:37:27,660 --> 00:37:31,920 of these new kinds of architectures. 853 00:37:31,920 --> 00:37:35,250 And lastly, I'd just like to mention 854 00:37:35,250 --> 00:37:36,930 Steve's issue, not Steve's issue, 855 00:37:36,930 --> 00:37:39,750 but semantics and the idea of Semantic Web. 856 00:37:39,750 --> 00:37:45,120 It's a real problem understanding schema, 857 00:37:45,120 --> 00:37:50,520 that it sounds like an easy issue, but I give you a schema. 858 00:37:50,520 --> 00:37:53,490 EPCglobal, say, publishes a schema. 859 00:37:53,490 --> 00:37:55,320 Now, what happens is I get that schema. 860 00:37:55,320 --> 00:37:56,670 I say, yeah, I understand it. 861 00:37:56,670 --> 00:37:58,230 I understand what shipping date is. 862 00:37:58,230 --> 00:38:00,180 I'm going to start programming things. 863 00:38:00,180 --> 00:38:03,000 And then it turns out that different companies 864 00:38:03,000 --> 00:38:05,700 have a different understanding of what shipping date means. 865 00:38:05,700 --> 00:38:08,910 Maybe it means when it's actually out of the dock door. 866 00:38:08,910 --> 00:38:09,880 Maybe it's not. 867 00:38:09,880 --> 00:38:12,310 Maybe it's just ready to be shipped. 868 00:38:12,310 --> 00:38:15,570 So these are real issues as to, how 869 00:38:15,570 --> 00:38:19,047 do you understand the semantics of the information 870 00:38:19,047 --> 00:38:20,130 that we're passing around? 871 00:38:23,470 --> 00:38:24,850 I think I'll finish there. 872 00:38:24,850 --> 00:38:29,090 That's a good place to finish. 873 00:38:29,090 --> 00:38:32,590 [APPLAUSE] 874 00:38:34,590 --> 00:38:36,470 STEVE MILES: So maybe five minutes 875 00:38:36,470 --> 00:38:37,740 of questions for the panel. 876 00:38:37,740 --> 00:38:39,740 This is a quite unusual opportunity 877 00:38:39,740 --> 00:38:42,860 to have this range of experience. 878 00:38:42,860 --> 00:38:46,910 Any questions for our panelists on the network and EPC network? 879 00:38:52,470 --> 00:38:55,660 Oh, actually, if you would come down the microphone, 880 00:38:55,660 --> 00:39:00,568 please, to ask any questions. 881 00:39:00,568 --> 00:39:02,556 [INAUDIBLE] 882 00:39:02,556 --> 00:39:07,040 AUDIENCE: I have a question. 883 00:39:07,040 --> 00:39:08,640 Actually, with this audience it's, 884 00:39:08,640 --> 00:39:10,350 I think, a very apt question. 885 00:39:10,350 --> 00:39:12,747 And I don't think I'd get this answer from anyone else. 886 00:39:12,747 --> 00:39:14,330 So how do we solve the schema problem? 887 00:39:14,330 --> 00:39:17,570 I mean, I think the Semantic Web actually 888 00:39:17,570 --> 00:39:20,060 I think is just very exciting on that front. 889 00:39:20,060 --> 00:39:22,872 But do you think eventually it's going to go away? 890 00:39:22,872 --> 00:39:24,080 Now, is it going to converge? 891 00:39:24,080 --> 00:39:25,455 Is that going to basically reduce 892 00:39:25,455 --> 00:39:27,060 the scale of the problem? 893 00:39:27,060 --> 00:39:29,962 JOHN WILLIAMS: Steve. 894 00:39:29,962 --> 00:39:31,420 STEVEN BRATT: This microphone work? 895 00:39:31,420 --> 00:39:32,470 Yeah, it does. 896 00:39:32,470 --> 00:39:35,890 Well, that's a good question because XML schema is really 897 00:39:35,890 --> 00:39:39,730 embedded in a lot of the business world already 898 00:39:39,730 --> 00:39:42,067 and has been relatively successful. 899 00:39:42,067 --> 00:39:44,650 But most of the companies find it very difficult to deal with, 900 00:39:44,650 --> 00:39:46,442 for the very reasons that John mentioned is 901 00:39:46,442 --> 00:39:49,870 that the understanding what the elements mean in a schema 902 00:39:49,870 --> 00:39:52,065 are not easily transparent. 903 00:39:52,065 --> 00:39:53,440 And so the Semantic Web is trying 904 00:39:53,440 --> 00:39:55,023 to address that problem by making sure 905 00:39:55,023 --> 00:39:57,910 that there's a much richer definition of everything 906 00:39:57,910 --> 00:39:58,643 also on the Web. 907 00:39:58,643 --> 00:40:00,310 So everything that's on the Web, there's 908 00:40:00,310 --> 00:40:02,020 also definitions of what it means. 909 00:40:02,020 --> 00:40:03,820 What units do you use? 910 00:40:03,820 --> 00:40:06,910 How do you define exactly what you mean by ship date? 911 00:40:06,910 --> 00:40:08,380 Those are hard problems, too. 912 00:40:08,380 --> 00:40:10,150 But the idea behind the Semantic Web 913 00:40:10,150 --> 00:40:11,920 is that you give people better tools 914 00:40:11,920 --> 00:40:16,570 for more richly expressing the meaning of everything 915 00:40:16,570 --> 00:40:17,990 that they want to put on the Web. 916 00:40:17,990 --> 00:40:20,198 So whether that will solve the problem, I don't know. 917 00:40:20,198 --> 00:40:22,315 It's a lot of complicated problems including 918 00:40:22,315 --> 00:40:23,440 research problems involved. 919 00:40:23,440 --> 00:40:25,398 But that's what the aim of the Semantic Web is. 920 00:40:28,649 --> 00:40:29,770 JOHN WILLIAMS: Yeah. 921 00:40:29,770 --> 00:40:33,680 I mean, I think to some extent, it's a human problem, 922 00:40:33,680 --> 00:40:39,650 that we as humans think we understand what a term means. 923 00:40:39,650 --> 00:40:40,700 And it depends. 924 00:40:40,700 --> 00:40:44,480 But we use something like Web services. 925 00:40:44,480 --> 00:40:46,790 It's pretty fuzzy as to what exactly 926 00:40:46,790 --> 00:40:49,910 that means, what it includes, and what it doesn't include. 927 00:40:49,910 --> 00:40:53,300 Now, as humans, we can get away with that fuzziness. 928 00:40:53,300 --> 00:40:57,590 I'll ask Steve, so did you really mean this or not? 929 00:40:57,590 --> 00:40:59,150 Now, the problem with computers is 930 00:40:59,150 --> 00:41:02,180 that they're automatically making decisions for us 931 00:41:02,180 --> 00:41:05,120 that we may not like. 932 00:41:05,120 --> 00:41:06,320 And we have no-- 933 00:41:06,320 --> 00:41:09,560 or we may not understand that the error has been made. 934 00:41:09,560 --> 00:41:11,360 That's the problem with the machine. 935 00:41:11,360 --> 00:41:13,940 And at the moment, what we do is we sit down in committees 936 00:41:13,940 --> 00:41:18,560 and agree on a precise definition of the term, that, 937 00:41:18,560 --> 00:41:20,660 say, in security, a security token 938 00:41:20,660 --> 00:41:22,700 has a very precise definition. 939 00:41:22,700 --> 00:41:26,180 And you better be aware of that committee and exactly 940 00:41:26,180 --> 00:41:28,400 what that definition is and not assume 941 00:41:28,400 --> 00:41:31,220 that you know the meaning. 942 00:41:31,220 --> 00:41:33,020 But I think it's a real issue. 943 00:41:33,020 --> 00:41:36,230 I think change is an issue when schemas change. 944 00:41:36,230 --> 00:41:39,510 And they undoubtedly will change. 945 00:41:39,510 --> 00:41:41,750 I think we have to think seriously about how 946 00:41:41,750 --> 00:41:42,875 we handle those changes. 947 00:41:42,875 --> 00:41:43,130 STEVEN BRATT: Versioning. 948 00:41:43,130 --> 00:41:44,463 JOHN WILLIAMS: Yeah, versioning. 949 00:41:44,463 --> 00:41:46,910 BERNIE HOGAN: I think John and Steve both touched on it. 950 00:41:46,910 --> 00:41:49,340 One of the other challenges is that the association 951 00:41:49,340 --> 00:41:51,650 of information, it's going to be different. 952 00:41:51,650 --> 00:41:56,030 John kind of alluded to it in his presentation about Google, 953 00:41:56,030 --> 00:41:59,240 but how you associate data, because as Sanjay mentioned, 954 00:41:59,240 --> 00:42:01,020 you eliminate the line of sight. 955 00:42:01,020 --> 00:42:03,540 And so you have all this information coming in today. 956 00:42:03,540 --> 00:42:05,330 So you may have a carton that's associated 957 00:42:05,330 --> 00:42:07,280 with a pallet in one instance. 958 00:42:07,280 --> 00:42:10,640 And then a few minutes later, it's disassociated. 959 00:42:10,640 --> 00:42:12,470 How you manage that and the systems 960 00:42:12,470 --> 00:42:14,238 and the solutions out there, it's 961 00:42:14,238 --> 00:42:16,030 going to be a huge challenge going forward. 962 00:42:18,640 --> 00:42:22,410 AUDIENCE: My question is related to what Bernie said, 963 00:42:22,410 --> 00:42:24,520 information sharing. 964 00:42:24,520 --> 00:42:27,330 Maybe this is a slightly different view 965 00:42:27,330 --> 00:42:30,600 from using immediately Google or putting-- 966 00:42:30,600 --> 00:42:35,910 translating RFID or EPC tag into URI. 967 00:42:35,910 --> 00:42:38,550 Basically, the way I look at it is 968 00:42:38,550 --> 00:42:41,820 RFID tag itself is just one piece of information. 969 00:42:41,820 --> 00:42:44,340 Here what matters is a holistic view 970 00:42:44,340 --> 00:42:49,080 of where things are, right, whereas the Google is not 971 00:42:49,080 --> 00:42:49,860 a holistic view. 972 00:42:49,860 --> 00:42:51,120 You type a word. 973 00:42:51,120 --> 00:42:54,480 It shows you a list of things that you, the human searcher, 974 00:42:54,480 --> 00:42:57,300 will need to integrate them, OK? 975 00:42:57,300 --> 00:43:00,150 And then also, in this holistic view 976 00:43:00,150 --> 00:43:04,290 that RFID is supposed to present, each part of it 977 00:43:04,290 --> 00:43:08,040 is owned and obtained by different companies. 978 00:43:08,040 --> 00:43:09,900 And most of the companies don't want 979 00:43:09,900 --> 00:43:11,250 to share those information. 980 00:43:11,250 --> 00:43:13,920 So they are caught in the middle. 981 00:43:13,920 --> 00:43:16,413 They know if they share information, 982 00:43:16,413 --> 00:43:17,830 there's going to be great benefit. 983 00:43:17,830 --> 00:43:21,300 On the other hand, no one wants to share, 984 00:43:21,300 --> 00:43:25,230 give total control of the actual information captured 985 00:43:25,230 --> 00:43:26,520 by their readers. 986 00:43:26,520 --> 00:43:29,700 So I'd just like to hear your comments on that. 987 00:43:29,700 --> 00:43:30,200 Thank you. 988 00:43:30,200 --> 00:43:31,080 BERNIE HOGAN: But there's another-- 989 00:43:31,080 --> 00:43:31,410 STEVEN BRATT: [INAUDIBLE] 990 00:43:31,410 --> 00:43:33,360 BERNIE HOGAN: There's another dimension to that. 991 00:43:33,360 --> 00:43:35,402 What we're experiencing with the communities that 992 00:43:35,402 --> 00:43:39,810 are involved with EPCglobal is migrating from a push model. 993 00:43:39,810 --> 00:43:42,660 If you look at EDI today, it's pretty much a push model. 994 00:43:42,660 --> 00:43:44,370 I'll send you all that information. 995 00:43:44,370 --> 00:43:46,890 And getting people to go to a pull model, 996 00:43:46,890 --> 00:43:50,190 so I can query for the information on demand, 997 00:43:50,190 --> 00:43:55,560 that really touches on the trust issue and the security issue. 998 00:43:55,560 --> 00:43:58,470 Not only do I trust you as a trading partner and a business 999 00:43:58,470 --> 00:44:00,000 partner. 1000 00:44:00,000 --> 00:44:02,850 And it's going to take a while to get people past that, 1001 00:44:02,850 --> 00:44:05,670 businesses past that issue. 1002 00:44:05,670 --> 00:44:07,470 And it's not just a technical issue. 1003 00:44:07,470 --> 00:44:11,445 There's a business process issue involved with that. 1004 00:44:11,445 --> 00:44:12,330 JOHN WILLIAMS: Yeah. 1005 00:44:12,330 --> 00:44:15,750 I think when-- there has to be some advantage to you 1006 00:44:15,750 --> 00:44:17,712 sharing your information. 1007 00:44:17,712 --> 00:44:19,920 I mean, the example with Google is, for example, they 1008 00:44:19,920 --> 00:44:24,690 provide Gmail where they give you two gigabytes of storage. 1009 00:44:24,690 --> 00:44:27,480 In exchange, they're watching your email. 1010 00:44:27,480 --> 00:44:30,090 They're running algorithms on your email. 1011 00:44:30,090 --> 00:44:33,450 Now, they're going to start offering data 1012 00:44:33,450 --> 00:44:35,820 storage in a big way because they want 1013 00:44:35,820 --> 00:44:37,680 to just see what you're doing. 1014 00:44:37,680 --> 00:44:41,400 As I say, Eric Schmidt's goal is to know where everything is. 1015 00:44:41,400 --> 00:44:44,280 He'll offer free storage in exchange 1016 00:44:44,280 --> 00:44:48,190 for just taking some of that information and processing it. 1017 00:44:48,190 --> 00:44:51,150 So I think it's these different business models that 1018 00:44:51,150 --> 00:44:54,930 are the fascinating thing, that you can give away something 1019 00:44:54,930 --> 00:44:58,800 for free because you're getting value from the statistics 1020 00:44:58,800 --> 00:45:01,485 that you're running on that data. 1021 00:45:01,485 --> 00:45:02,910 AUDIENCE: One comment. 1022 00:45:02,910 --> 00:45:06,000 Here the trust is not about individual users, 1023 00:45:06,000 --> 00:45:07,170 which can be easily bought. 1024 00:45:07,170 --> 00:45:09,810 I can be bought by [INAUDIBLE]. 1025 00:45:09,810 --> 00:45:12,608 But if it's a company, it's a very different story. 1026 00:45:12,608 --> 00:45:14,576 That's what I'm trying to suggest. 1027 00:45:14,576 --> 00:45:16,210 JOHN WILLIAMS: Right, but I think 1028 00:45:16,210 --> 00:45:20,120 there has to be some demonstrable benefit. 1029 00:45:20,120 --> 00:45:21,430 And I think there will be. 1030 00:45:21,430 --> 00:45:25,790 So the ROIs need to be explicated. 1031 00:45:25,790 --> 00:45:26,730 AUDIENCE: All right. 1032 00:45:26,730 --> 00:45:27,930 Hello. 1033 00:45:27,930 --> 00:45:29,670 My name is Kevin Fu from UMass Amherst. 1034 00:45:29,670 --> 00:45:31,800 And I have a question about where 1035 00:45:31,800 --> 00:45:33,330 the Internet of Things, what role it 1036 00:45:33,330 --> 00:45:35,070 may play in the next generation internet. 1037 00:45:35,070 --> 00:45:37,590 So David Clark here of MIT is talking 1038 00:45:37,590 --> 00:45:39,030 that the internet is broke broken, 1039 00:45:39,030 --> 00:45:41,580 that we need to design it from the ground up and start over. 1040 00:45:41,580 --> 00:45:43,800 So could you tell us what you think 1041 00:45:43,800 --> 00:45:47,070 is the best place for the Internet of Things to play, 1042 00:45:47,070 --> 00:45:53,660 what's its best role in the next generation internet, 1043 00:45:53,660 --> 00:45:55,450 in two seconds? 1044 00:45:55,450 --> 00:45:57,950 STEVEN BRATT: I'd say just quickly, 1045 00:45:57,950 --> 00:45:59,390 I mean, it strikes me again that I 1046 00:45:59,390 --> 00:46:00,750 like to think of things on the internet, 1047 00:46:00,750 --> 00:46:02,958 whether it's this generation of internet or the next. 1048 00:46:02,958 --> 00:46:06,380 And that clearly, compared to the first generation 1049 00:46:06,380 --> 00:46:08,840 of the internet or the Web generation of the internet, 1050 00:46:08,840 --> 00:46:10,100 things are going to be-- 1051 00:46:10,100 --> 00:46:12,950 there'll be a lot more things that are 1052 00:46:12,950 --> 00:46:14,660 available through whatever means, 1053 00:46:14,660 --> 00:46:17,660 whether it's the Semantic Web or some other technologies, 1054 00:46:17,660 --> 00:46:19,610 on the future internet. 1055 00:46:19,610 --> 00:46:23,570 And so I guess you'd need to be able to design for that. 1056 00:46:23,570 --> 00:46:26,060 Now, of course, moving to IPv6 was one example 1057 00:46:26,060 --> 00:46:28,010 of being able to greatly increase 1058 00:46:28,010 --> 00:46:30,430 the number of possible IP addresses so that everything, 1059 00:46:30,430 --> 00:46:32,930 every grain of sand in the world or whatever could have one. 1060 00:46:32,930 --> 00:46:35,180 But there's a number of other probably design principles 1061 00:46:35,180 --> 00:46:37,722 that Dave Clark has, I'm sure, thought about more than I have 1062 00:46:37,722 --> 00:46:40,460 that certainly would need to be taken into account. 1063 00:46:40,460 --> 00:46:44,330 Just the sheer volume and the security, again, 1064 00:46:44,330 --> 00:46:47,600 associated with what those kinds of huge volumes of things 1065 00:46:47,600 --> 00:46:51,060 are I would think would be important. 1066 00:46:51,060 --> 00:46:51,880 AUDIENCE: Hi. 1067 00:46:51,880 --> 00:46:52,760 My name is Ying Li. 1068 00:46:52,760 --> 00:46:54,840 I'm also from UMass Amherst. 1069 00:46:54,840 --> 00:46:55,910 So I have two questions. 1070 00:46:55,910 --> 00:46:57,340 The first was technical. 1071 00:46:57,340 --> 00:47:02,170 So in the software stack that at the bottom has this device data 1072 00:47:02,170 --> 00:47:05,290 and then filter, transform, and data that's published, 1073 00:47:05,290 --> 00:47:07,570 where does XML come into play? 1074 00:47:07,570 --> 00:47:10,300 Is there any benefit of pushing XML down 1075 00:47:10,300 --> 00:47:13,690 to lower layers of the software processing environment? 1076 00:47:17,330 --> 00:47:21,270 BERNIE HOGAN: In the EPCglobal stack-- 1077 00:47:21,270 --> 00:47:23,700 I'm not sure stack is the right word these days-- 1078 00:47:23,700 --> 00:47:27,090 but it allows for an XML binding. 1079 00:47:27,090 --> 00:47:32,700 There's not a significant demand for that at this point in time 1080 00:47:32,700 --> 00:47:34,370 because it's pretty low level. 1081 00:47:34,370 --> 00:47:36,660 And you could express it in different ways, 1082 00:47:36,660 --> 00:47:39,120 although some companies have the preference. 1083 00:47:39,120 --> 00:47:42,030 And the standard allows for that option. 1084 00:47:42,030 --> 00:47:44,432 Where the XML places is as-- 1085 00:47:44,432 --> 00:47:46,140 I think it was in Sanjay's presentation-- 1086 00:47:46,140 --> 00:47:51,070 EPCIS data that's stored at the repository. 1087 00:47:51,070 --> 00:47:53,170 So the EPCIS standard allows for a way 1088 00:47:53,170 --> 00:47:56,250 to store information and retrieve information. 1089 00:47:56,250 --> 00:48:01,605 The opportunity in the information sharing and the-- 1090 00:48:01,605 --> 00:48:04,170 that will be expressed in XML. 1091 00:48:04,170 --> 00:48:10,340 How that's done, it's still very early in the process 1092 00:48:10,340 --> 00:48:12,543 to describe how that's going to be done 1093 00:48:12,543 --> 00:48:14,460 and how information is going to be associated. 1094 00:48:14,460 --> 00:48:16,410 AUDIENCE: Oh, so you think it's rather 1095 00:48:16,410 --> 00:48:18,595 a representation for storage? 1096 00:48:18,595 --> 00:48:21,510 BERNIE HOGAN: Yes, that is the thinking today. 1097 00:48:21,510 --> 00:48:22,010 Yes. 1098 00:48:22,010 --> 00:48:22,700 AUDIENCE: OK. 1099 00:48:22,700 --> 00:48:22,970 BERNIE HOGAN: [INAUDIBLE] 1100 00:48:22,970 --> 00:48:23,803 AUDIENCE: All right. 1101 00:48:23,803 --> 00:48:25,490 So the other question is, so when 1102 00:48:25,490 --> 00:48:29,650 you talk about the Internet of Things through Web technology, 1103 00:48:29,650 --> 00:48:33,410 is RFID data management, does it represent any new challenges? 1104 00:48:33,410 --> 00:48:36,920 Or is it just an application of the current Web services 1105 00:48:36,920 --> 00:48:40,380 in Semantic Web technology? 1106 00:48:40,380 --> 00:48:43,200 Does it represent anything fundamentally new? 1107 00:48:46,364 --> 00:48:49,530 JOHN WILLIAMS: Well, yeah, it's not there yet. 1108 00:48:49,530 --> 00:48:51,110 I mean, we don't know how to do this, 1109 00:48:51,110 --> 00:48:53,150 to build a global network. 1110 00:48:53,150 --> 00:48:57,290 I think Sanjay was pointing out that we've 1111 00:48:57,290 --> 00:49:01,190 got all these challenges of, how do you control costs? 1112 00:49:01,190 --> 00:49:05,130 How do you make the chips cheap enough? 1113 00:49:05,130 --> 00:49:07,280 How do you get enough data? 1114 00:49:07,280 --> 00:49:08,780 How do you get reliable data? 1115 00:49:08,780 --> 00:49:14,580 How do you inference from incomplete data? 1116 00:49:14,580 --> 00:49:16,290 We don't know how to do those things. 1117 00:49:16,290 --> 00:49:17,488 AUDIENCE: I see. 1118 00:49:17,488 --> 00:49:20,030 JOHN WILLIAMS: And, yeah, the algorithms aren't there, that-- 1119 00:49:20,030 --> 00:49:20,835 AUDIENCE: OK. 1120 00:49:20,835 --> 00:49:22,210 So it has certain characteristics 1121 00:49:22,210 --> 00:49:25,770 of data uncertainty, security issues involved. 1122 00:49:25,770 --> 00:49:28,060 So they do present some new challenges 1123 00:49:28,060 --> 00:49:29,560 beyond other applications. 1124 00:49:29,560 --> 00:49:30,710 OK, that's a good answer. 1125 00:49:30,710 --> 00:49:33,560 Thank you. 1126 00:49:33,560 --> 00:49:35,690 JOHN WILLIAMS: I don't know how to do it. 1127 00:49:35,690 --> 00:49:36,670 AUDIENCE: Yes, hello. 1128 00:49:36,670 --> 00:49:37,220 Good morning. 1129 00:49:37,220 --> 00:49:38,350 My name is Harold Boeck. 1130 00:49:38,350 --> 00:49:42,550 I'm with the University of Sherbrooke and also the Écol 1131 00:49:42,550 --> 00:49:43,300 Polytechnique. 1132 00:49:43,300 --> 00:49:46,150 I probably believe I'm the only marketing professor that 1133 00:49:46,150 --> 00:49:49,018 works in an RFID lab. 1134 00:49:49,018 --> 00:49:50,420 [APPLAUSE] 1135 00:49:50,420 --> 00:49:51,370 Thank you. 1136 00:49:51,370 --> 00:49:53,920 And during your presentation, you 1137 00:49:53,920 --> 00:49:56,500 talked about the research opportunities 1138 00:49:56,500 --> 00:50:00,910 in terms of business justification and ROIs. 1139 00:50:00,910 --> 00:50:03,130 And this is specifically what I'm interested in. 1140 00:50:03,130 --> 00:50:08,020 And you mentioned that certain companies get the ROI, 1141 00:50:08,020 --> 00:50:10,600 whereas other companies are still looking for it. 1142 00:50:13,120 --> 00:50:15,190 What do you believe is the reason 1143 00:50:15,190 --> 00:50:17,950 that the companies who have not found the ROI 1144 00:50:17,950 --> 00:50:21,150 are not finding it? 1145 00:50:21,150 --> 00:50:23,140 BERNIE HOGAN: I'm going to be dangerous here. 1146 00:50:23,140 --> 00:50:25,300 I think you will notice a relationship 1147 00:50:25,300 --> 00:50:28,087 between the companies that get it and their success. 1148 00:50:28,087 --> 00:50:29,920 If you look at the companies that are lead-- 1149 00:50:29,920 --> 00:50:31,962 these are leadership companies, that they get it. 1150 00:50:31,962 --> 00:50:34,000 They've applied the resources. 1151 00:50:34,000 --> 00:50:35,790 Some of the companies that are involved 1152 00:50:35,790 --> 00:50:37,540 have been involved with the AUTO-ID Center 1153 00:50:37,540 --> 00:50:41,485 since 1999 and 2000. 1154 00:50:41,485 --> 00:50:43,840 It's no different than other standards 1155 00:50:43,840 --> 00:50:48,460 if you look at the companies that led the way for UPC codes 1156 00:50:48,460 --> 00:50:49,670 for in the early days. 1157 00:50:49,670 --> 00:50:52,725 UPC was the standard for 10 years before it took off. 1158 00:50:52,725 --> 00:50:54,100 But there were companies who were 1159 00:50:54,100 --> 00:50:57,160 involved working the standard, and deploying 1160 00:50:57,160 --> 00:50:59,440 it, and discovering it. 1161 00:50:59,440 --> 00:51:03,850 Some of the other companies are further along in the curve. 1162 00:51:03,850 --> 00:51:07,930 I think there's a community in the middle that's not sure. 1163 00:51:07,930 --> 00:51:12,430 And then you'll have the industry laggards, as we say. 1164 00:51:12,430 --> 00:51:14,200 The point I was trying to make is 1165 00:51:14,200 --> 00:51:16,970 that we need to focus from a communication 1166 00:51:16,970 --> 00:51:18,850 standpoint on the companies in the middle 1167 00:51:18,850 --> 00:51:20,410 to help tip them over. 1168 00:51:20,410 --> 00:51:23,530 No different than anything else like the World Wide Web, 1169 00:51:23,530 --> 00:51:25,720 or email, or any other technology, 1170 00:51:25,720 --> 00:51:32,470 we need a tipping point to tip them over to get it. 1171 00:51:32,470 --> 00:51:36,910 To John's point, there has to be a compelling business 1172 00:51:36,910 --> 00:51:41,680 opportunity that will just get these companies past the trust 1173 00:51:41,680 --> 00:51:44,855 issue, past the security issue. 1174 00:51:44,855 --> 00:51:45,980 And that's going to happen. 1175 00:51:45,980 --> 00:51:48,430 And I think it's really in the marketing area. 1176 00:51:48,430 --> 00:51:49,520 It's a messaging area. 1177 00:51:49,520 --> 00:51:52,150 The technology is-- to me, is-- 1178 00:51:52,150 --> 00:51:54,850 I think we've solved some of these problems many, many times 1179 00:51:54,850 --> 00:51:55,930 over. 1180 00:51:55,930 --> 00:52:00,970 But it's a messaging-- and look at some of the work that-- 1181 00:52:00,970 --> 00:52:04,510 MIT is doing it with their the business cases and University 1182 00:52:04,510 --> 00:52:06,550 of Arkansas with Walmart and those type things. 1183 00:52:06,550 --> 00:52:08,860 STEVE MILES: So actually, if I could interrupt here 1184 00:52:08,860 --> 00:52:11,440 because we're eating into our break time. 1185 00:52:11,440 --> 00:52:15,730 And tomorrow we have a session on supply chain 1186 00:52:15,730 --> 00:52:18,940 that is very much aimed at asking 1187 00:52:18,940 --> 00:52:21,260 those very types of questions. 1188 00:52:21,260 --> 00:52:23,320 So I'd like to thank our panelists very much. 1189 00:52:23,320 --> 00:52:26,670 [APPLAUSE]