Theseos: A Query Engine for Traceability across Sovereign, Distributed RFID Databases

The ability to trace the history of individual products, especially their movement through supply and distribution chains, is key to many solutions such as targeted recalls and counterfeit detection. In most traceability applications a number of independent organizations have to work together. EPCglobal has proposed an architecture for a network of RFID databases where each database provides a standardized query interface. That architecture facilitates simple retrieval of traceability data from individual repositories, but it does not support complex traceability queries or cross-organizational query processing. Theseos (R. Agrawal, 2006) provides traceability applications with the ability to execute complex traceability queries that may span multiple RFID databases.