A lookup service in an interconnected world of uniquely identified objects

Automatic identification (auto-ID) procedures exist to provide information about people, animals, goods and products in transit. The RFID technology is one of the newest and mostly emerging implementations of the auto-ID concept. Most of the current applications of the RFID technology pair the unique ID (UID) stored in RFID tags attached to an item with information about it, which is located in information systems. When the item gets transferred or modified, new information might need to be paired with its UID as well. The EPCglobal has defined standards that facilitate the collection, storage, update, location and sharing of the information related to the UID. In this paper, we explain the disadvantages of the EPC glocal approach and discuss an infrastructure with an associated service built on top, which is intended to organize the information associated with any object, and guide the process of discovering and retrieving specific information for specific items, tagged with a unique id, in an efficient and scalable way. Then we will describe the overall architecture and the proposed service, called service lookup service (SLS) and we will provide a proposed protocol for implementing the aforementioned service.