Management of RFID-centric business networks using Web Services

Rapid adoption of RFID has proved to be a comprehensive litmus test for technologies enabling collaborative commerce. Webservices technology helps bind various components of a typical RFID deployment, namely applications, middleware and edge software, within and also across corporate boundaries. These enterprise scale components are being built as per standards and specifications from EPCGlobal Inc. The key area of "effective monitoring and management" of these business networks, however, seems to have remained only in the wish-lists of application vendors for a long while now. In this work we list some of the recent developments in the world of webservices that are crucial and attempt to show how incorporating them in specifications related to RFID-centric networks can offer benefits by enabling better service availability and reliability. This paper also attempts to realize the RFID middleware itself as a managed resource and show how it enables new options in the management landscape of RFID centric networks.