
176 CHAPTER EIGHT
This table assumes seven 10-hour days per week and 30 minutes of peak sales and stock-
ing activity per day. This does not take into account activity at the registers or other inven-
tory changes, such as returns. The total yearly raw observations come to 100,210,000, or
about 669 MB. For real-time tracking of 400,000 items, this seems like a reasonable
amount of data to manage; even for all of the stores together it only amounts to about
6690 MB of data, which will fit on two DVDs.
The EPCglobal Network
EPCglobal envisions a network of EPC-enabled data services that is used by trading part-
ners to enable near-real-time tracking information on items in their supply chains. This
vision is termed the EPCglobal Network. (As you can see, this is a CPG-oriented vision, but
even today, adoption of RFID technology is expanding well beyond the CPG industry and
supply chains.) The EPCglobal Network introduces a few dedicated components, such as
the Object Naming Service (ONS) and the EPC Information Services (EPCIS), that you
may or may not need for your applications. However, chances are that you will end up
using or developing similar components to meet your requirements. Understanding what
these components have to offer will help you make the right architectural choices regard-
ing distributed recording and querying of EPC (or any RFID event) data.
The EPCglobal Network aims to provide ...