The message at RFID World in Dallas is that things seem to be coming together in RFID. According to Bryan Tracey, Chief Architect of Globe Ranger, the Application Level Event (ALE) specification is due for ratification in "about two weeks." ALE provides a nice way of separating the application from any sensor hardware or deployment considerations. More on ALE later, but this is probably the most important spec to read for anyone who will actually be writing an RFID application.
Also interesting was a presentation by Michael Denning, Sr. Product Manager for Verisign's EPC Services. He described a federated discovery service to back the Object Naming Service (ONS) which would overcome ONS limitations.
ONS is a way of tying the number on an RFID tag to the EPC Information Service which has all of the information about that tag. Think of the EPC number like a hostname and ONS like DNS. When you give a hostname to DNS it gives you an IP address. When you give an EPC to ONS it gives you the address of an EPCIS server. The problem is that ONS can only return a local EPCIS or the original EPCIS (often the manufacturer of the item). If a wholesaler or a trucking company had the item in between, ONS has no way of giving you their EPCIS addresses. That's a big problem for track and trace applications.
The new Federated Discovery service which Verisign, as a member of EPC, is pushing to add to a future ONS standard would provide a much more flexible naming service, capable of returning any number of intermediary EPCIS servers.
An anonymous source also hinted that Verisign will be revealing an XML certificates compatible with WS 1.0 including the Liberty Alliance. This will mean being able to sign XML documents using appropriate certificates issued by Verisign and also being able to sign portions of XML documents. That could make non-repudiation and digital signatures much easier to manage, and allow for more secure transmission of information between trading partners including RFID information.
The exhibition floor is full of integrators at this conference with fewer physics demos and more about tying together complete solutions. Tag and ship stations were all the rage this year with packages from SIS Technologies and Sun and probably more that I missed on display. SIS especially had a slick demo with voice prompts and industrial enclosures. Their Mustang unit is a Linux box in a flat enclosure which can concentrate reads from up to 32 readers and can do arbitrarily complex processing.
Disclaimer: I work for Sun, and SIS Technologies is a partner of Sun (but then, who isn't?)