The MIT Auto ID Center disbanded itself in November 2003 and left behind a legacy of knowledge and understanding, nascent standards and visions for the future. Looking forward, how will that legacy benefit vendors and customers hoping to benefit from RFID?
The Auto ID Center made a great contribution to worldwide awareness and understanding of RFID. The center described use cases, provided projections for return on investment and ran trial deployments. These efforts revealed some very reasonable and feasible applications for RFID and led directly to the Wal-Mart mandate. They also revealed applications like the smart shelf which won’t be feasible for quite some time. By creating wide exposure for RFID and its applications, the Auto ID Center indirectly raised privacy concerns. This helped credible organizations such as the ACLU, EFF and EPIC to create their platform positions and inform consumers about the risks of certain types of RFID deployments.
The net result of all this is that the public now knows more about what is feasible with RFID and what is not. We also know which applications degrade privacy and which do not.
The Auto ID Center also developed and encouraged adoption of standards for RFID. These standards are wide-ranging, including the Electronic Product Code (ePC) numbering system, ePC tag standards, Savant middleware, Physical Markup Language (PML) for information exchange and ePC-Information Service (ePC-IS) for RFID-related repositories.
None of these standards is an instant winner or a guaranteed long-term survivor. The ePC numbering system is currently being enhanced and made compatible with the broader Global Trade Item Number (GTIN) standard. The standard ePC Class 1 tag requires better security and authentication as well as other added features to be useful in future years.
The software standards – Savant, PML and ePC-IS – simply provided a basis for describing the applications and implementing the early RFID pilots. As commercial interest in RFID grows, these components should be swept away by commercial middleware and infrastructure products from established vendors and new ventures.
All in all, we should not expect much of the Auto ID Centers proposed standards to remain in use - in their current forms - as RFID continues to emerge. This doesn’t diminish or tarnish the legacy of the Auto ID Center. The Center provided a very important blueprint. Now commercial enterprises are beginning to build the robust systems that the blueprint described. Without the Auto ID Center, we could not have moved RFID forward, so far and so fast.
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