Ubiquitous Electronic Tagging

The automatic identification industry is growing rapidly. Tags occur in many forms and appear on everything from luggage at the airport, to dogs, trains and fresh fruit. As with many advancing technologies, there are a variety of standards that do not inter-operate and thus hinder widespread deployment. But the trend for the growth of this technology is inescapable: electronic machine-readable tags (e-tags) are becoming tiny, cheap and easy to deploy. An e-tag can now also serve as a data repository for the object that it is attached to. Imagine if every object ever processed had one or more machine-readable tags embedded into it. What applications would that enable? These tags would uniquely identify the object and be readable from a distance, not even requiring a battery. In addition to identification information, e-tags can record their history, or offer dynamic data from an embedded sensor indicating, for example, the tag's temperature. This paper examines the applications an...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2000
• Where: DSONLINE
• Authors: Roy Want, Daniel M. Russell
• Keywords: DSONLINE 2000, Electronic Machine-readable Tags, Machine-readable Tags, Tags