department of informatics

RESTful EPCIS – Design and Implementation of a Web-enabled Electronic Product Code Information Service (EPCIS)

Master Thesis in Informatics 2009

Mathias Müller

Supervisors : Dr. Patrik Fuhrer , Prof. Jacques Pasquier-Rocha (@University of Fribourg) and Dominique Guinard (@ETH Zurich)

December 2009

Context

This master thesis is hosted at the University of Fribourg, but is proposed and supervised by both Dr. Patrik Fuhrer (University of Fribourg - Switzerland) and Dominique Guinard (ETH Zürich - Switzerland).

Thus, this project is collaboration and a joint effort between the two following research groups:

  • the Software Engineering Group of the Department of Informatics of the University of Fribourg (lead by Prof. J. Pasquier);
  • the Distributed Systems Research Group of the Department of Computer Science of the ETH Zurich (lead by Prof. F. Mattern).

Distributed Systems Group at the ETH Zürich (CH)       Eidgenössicsche Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETHZ)

Goal of the projet

In the Internet of Things world, the EPCIS (Electronic Product Code Information Server) is the standard information server for RFID events. The EPCIS standard was mainly targeted towards "big enterprise applications". Thus, building applications on top of it as well as exploring the RFID events it contains is not trivial.

Following the trends of Web 2.0 Mashups, in this project we propose building a novel RESTful version of an EPCIS, that would enable RFID-based mashups. Such a solution would for instance enable people to browse RFID observations as they would browse Web pages. Furthermore, it would enable client to query the EPCIS and subscribe to EPC events through simple Web requests on URLs and get the notifications in RSS feeds.

In this project aims to design and develop a RESTful interface for the Fosstrak EPC Information Server (Fosstrak), an open-source implementation of the standard. Fosstrak was founded by ETH Zurich's Distributed Systems Group and, with the help of numerous of our students, has grown into today's most comprehensive open-source RFID platform that is compliant with the EPC Network specifications developed by the EPCglobal non-profit organization.

Additionally, the student will be asked to build a mobile prototype (iPhone, Android or Nokia) to demonstrate the use of this new interface.

Contribution

The following files are the results of this thesis.

The RESTful EPCIS and the EPC Dashboard can be tested here.