
RFID MIDDLEWARE 139
threshold. As you can imagine, an order management system wouldn’t be the least bit inter-
ested in knowing whether RFID readers are employed in tracking the items in the stores, let
alone how many readers there are per store and in what configuration. Exposing an order
management system to every scan of an RFID reader without any application-level filtering
would be unnecessary and counterproductive. Consequently, there’s a need for middleware
that can not only consolidate, aggregate, and filter raw observations coming from readers and
sensors, but also provide application-level context. As you can see, this requires some pro-
cessing of the raw RFID observations before they are sent to your applications. The process of
smoothing out the raw RFID observations coming from readers and sensors or otherwise
making them more meaningful for enterprise applications is called event filtering. The compo-
nent that provides the event filtering functions is called the event manager.
Providing a Standards-Based Service Interface
One of the primary benefits of using RFID middleware is that it provides a standardized
way of dealing with the flood of information created by the tiny RFID tags. What is needed
is a service-oriented interface—we’ll call this the application-level interface—that provides
application-level semantics to the collection of RFID data. Following the principles of ...