RFID in Denmark
As an employee of Knowledge Lab, I attended the SUMMIT05 conference on wednesday and thursday this week. On thursday, I participated in a very interesting workshop on "Context sensitivity and Tagging". The workshop was led by Professor Kaj Grønbæk, who presented various context aware technology projects taking place at the InteractiveSpaces research center. Representatives from BLIP Systems and Cordura A/S presented solutions and technologies based on Bluetooth and RFID chips. RFID Journal carries an article that describes one of the projects presented by Cordura.
The workshop also introduced a Danish website - RFID Vidensbank - that attemps to collect and disperse information about RFID technologies.
Impressions from the workshop: There are several manufactures of RFID chips in the market, but each manufacturer has chosen to design their chips to respond at proprietary frequencies (one manufacturer uses a frequency within the interval used for european cellular networks). No standards, so *everybody* wait and see how Walmart's RFID project turns out and whether Walmart's size will establish a defacto standard. The representative from Cordura A/S told us that Cordura experienced substantial interest in RFID technologies from businesses. Among other projects, Cordura has been assigned the task of integrating tagging technology into the Danfoss Universe park.
There are currently several Danish RFID initiatives in progress: The InteractiveSpaces research center mentioned above is part of the ISIS Katrinebjerg compentence center (with which RFID Vidensbank is also affiliated); ITEK has recently hosted a conference on RFID for the food sector; The Danish Technological Institute is in the process of establishing a RFID test center for the packaging and transport industry (Teknologisk Institut has released a short initial report, which re-states some of the issues mentioned above).
It would seem natural that various RFID efforts should be coordinated within a small country such as Denmark. Hopefully, venues such as RFID Vidensbank will enable this coordination and knowledge sharing. I personally believe that coordination between initiatives is crucial due to the fact that the "killer" benefit of RFID is to be found by considering the life cycles of tagged artifacts. The Cordura project involving museum artifacts (see above) is tightly focused on using the technology to enhance the experience of the museum guest. In order to represent an appealing business case, this scenario should be expanded to include inventory and tracking (since museum artifacts are moved between storage and exhibition); transport (artifacts move between different museums); theft prevention and probably also "life cycle monitoring" in general (museum artifacts are resold, but there are issues of authentication and public/community interest). Considering the life cycle of tagged artifacts not only provides additional arguments in favour of buying into the technology - it facilitates collaboration between different enterprises within a value chain. Such collaboration provides a strengthened business case and disperses the cost of introducing the technology among the participating enterprises.
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