2007-04-28 -- Afilias, a provider of Internet domain name registry services, announced that it is offering its new Discovery Services for free to RFID or other supply chain-based pilot programs to organizations in India throughout 2007.
"Afilias has expanded its proven expertise in registry services to create an answer for serious issues facing the global deployment of RFID and AutoID technologies today," said Ram Mohan, Chief Technology Officer for Afilias.
"Afilias Discovery Services provide a unique standards-based solution that companies can implement to link their supply chain partners to historical information concerning the life cycle of RFID tags, while still keeping competitive data secure. We believe this will help enhance the adoption speed of RFID, which is projected to be a $3 billion - $5 billion industry in India alone," added Mohan.
SITA, a leading service provider of IT business solutions and communications services to the air transport industry, has selected Afilias to provide Discovery Services for its AutoID Community Service pilot.
Afilias Discovery Services (ADS) leverage the Extensible Supply Chain Discovery Service (ESDS) open protocol and provides complimentary Object Naming Services (ONS) compliant with EPCglobal standards. ADS provides a common database repository to store key events for each tagged product. It can also provide a referral source for detailed look-ups to other partners' business applications.
ADS is a real-time system that enables supply chain partners to "track and trace" and securely exchange historical events that occurred throughout the life cycle of an RFID tag or device. Security is customizable and user configurable by such factors as event type, or even by supply chain partner, so that confidential and competitive data can only be visible for those who need to know.
Users employ a client, based on the ESDS open protocol, to interface with the ADS database. This makes it interoperable and easy to integrate into any supply chain operation or existing business application tracking supply chain data. Afilias is offering ADS for free to companies interested in testing this new technology in pilot programs throughout 2007.
Afilias said it will provide a toolkit and an open testing environment based on the ESDS open protocol, which is currently in the submission process to the Internet Engineering Task Force (www.IETF.org).
