Ubiquitous Electronic Tagging

The automatic identification industry is growing rapidly. Machine-readable tags occur in many forms and appear on everything from luggage at the airport, to dogs, trains and fresh fruit. Electronic tags are a subset of this market with the potential to revolutionize the tagging industry. As with many advancing technologies, there are a variety of tagging standards that do not inter-operate and thus hinder widespread deployment, and hinder the creation of applications that could take advantage of tags used by a variety of industries. This paper examines the applications and consequences of Ubiquitous Tagging, the technology currently available to build it and some future technologies beginning to emerge, which could turn ‘Ubiquitous Tagging’ from a nascent technology into an industry wide feature of modern manufacturing. At the end of the paper, we close with a discussion of several concurrency issues that ubiquitous tagging brings to the fore.