An Aggregating Discovery Service for the EPCglobal Network

Although the achievements of EPCglobal standardization efforts in the last years are substantial and the diffusion of the EPCglobal network continues, a service to access item-level information stored at potentially unknown supply chain partners is still missing. Without this 'Discovery Service' the EPCglobal network cannot be used with unknown business partners. In this contribution we present a novel Discovery Service approach. In contrast to other Discovery Service approaches we use the Discovery Service to aggregate the data of interest. This eliminates problems other approaches cannot solve, e.g. assuring data ownership, low access control maintenance effort, and minimal complexity for the information requester. We present a requirements model, describe the implementation of our Discovery Service approach, and compare it to existing Discovery Service approaches. Finally we show how to overcome scalability challenges to implement our Discovery Service approach in a real-world environment.