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Pulling the Back-Room Data Warehouse onto Center Stage with RFID

Imagine a world where people, machines, products, buildings, computers, food, transport systems and more are all interconnected into a web of objects. The information about them is being captured, processed and analyzed in an event-based environment by an all-powerful, central think tank.

It is now possible, with the interconnection provided by RFID and the think tank being the data warehouse (DW)/business intelligence (BI).

How is this interplay of RFID and DW/BI technologies possible?

RFID is a disruptive technology belonging to the class of auto IDs. It will trigger a paradigm shift in the positioning of DW in the information management lifecycle.

The vision for RFID-enabled DW systems include intelligent supply chains and its associated value to customers at all levels. There could arise the creation of new DW/BI solutions, gadgets and even analytical appliances for the general consumer that DW technology currently caters to. Newer RFID-enabled BI reporting and analysis tools will flood the market to cater to the wide range of audiences for analytical reporting ranging from business users to retail industry users to even home consumer users. The RFID-enabled DW will facilitate newer methods of data capture, analysis and reporting. The synergistic integration of BI/DW with RFID and Bluetooth technologies, though seemingly far-fetched, is very much realizable in the near future.

In the early days, the computing power was mainly in the realms of the corporate world. The advent of PCs brought the benefits and joys of this computing power to the mass consumers. Similarly the onset of BI/DW-based gadgets/appliances will facilitate the analytical power to be within the reach of the general consumers, as compared to the elitist nature of serving only the top and middle management users, which BI/DW does currently.

But how do all these pieces of the RFID-DW-BI jigsaw puzzle fit together. First, let us refresh ourselves with a few concepts on RFID and also BI/DW before we put it all together into an architectural framework.

Information about an object is stored in a small chip that is connected to an antenna, and in some cases powered by a battery. This combination of chip and antenna is called an RFID tag. Another device, called a reader or interrogator, transmits a signal that searches for applicable RFID tags within the reader's range. When the tag's antenna picks up the signal, the tag activates and transmits the information stored on its chip to the reader. The reader then passes the tag's information to a back-end computer system to complete the identification process and also initiate workflows and further analysis.

Figure 1: How RFID Works

Data warehouse is subject-oriented, time-variant, nonvolatile and integrated approach to data organization. The various components of a data warehouse are the source systems, operational data stores (ODS), data warehouses, data marts, BI reporting and analysis tools, and data movement tools (also called ETL tools). For more advanced forecasting and statistical analysis, BI/DW also has matured data mining tools and technologies for achieving the same.

Both the RFID and BI/DW technologies get integrated seamlessly into an architecture that not only puts all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together but also helps to develop other tangible architectures in an enterprise framework. Shown below is one such architecture that depicts the use of multiple ODSs and a centralized DW for the capture, processing and analysis of the RFID data.

Figure 2: RFID and BI

In the above architecture the data is captured via the RFID tags and passed onto the ODS via the RFID readers. The data from the distributed ODS is then moved to a centralized DW. BI reporting systems can be built to report against the localized ODS and also the central DW as per the reporting needs.

It is very interesting to note that both conceptually and technically there are a number of parallels between the RFID technology components and the BI/DW components and hence they neatly map onto each other, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: RFID and BI/DW Parallels

Now that we have a proper architecture in place, let us discuss some of the BI/DW concepts that are going to be challenged by the onset of the RFID data into the DW/BI systems.

The most crucial point of impact of any RFID-enabled BI/DW initiative is the RFID data sources. RFID technology will bring in a dynamic exploding data in the data source layer of the DW/BI initiative. This will in turn demand a more dynamic analysis of the RFID data, for it to be of any use.

The next crucial impact is on the data modeling, data organization and data interpretation technologies. There is a need for newer and efficient data modeling and DW architecting techniques to meet the influx of RFID data sources into DW/BI analysis system. This will also necessitate newer semantic-oriented database technologies and the appropriate data modeling techniques, to handle these large and constantly varying RFID data with a pertinent need for spatial (geographical) tracking of the RFID data across the supply chain of any business domain.

The third crucial impact is the data standardization of the RFID data, so that all the entities in the supply chain can automatically share data, thus enabling a tremendous increase in automation at many levels of the supply chain environment. It is here that the BI/DW technologies are far more matured and evolved compared to the OLTP systems and hence will play a crucial role in the data standardization processes at both syntax and semantic levels.

The fourth impact is the event-based approach to data and information analysis that the BI/DW will have to provide. This is because auto ID/RFID enables machine-to-machine communication, which is automatic, event-driven, and which necessitates that data is captured and processed in real time. This will have a big impact on the way BI/DW processes are designed, which means the BI/DW architectures will have to be flexible, agile, efficient and event oriented.

Why DW/BI Needs to be RFID Ready

It is very important for DW/BI technologies to be RFID ready because in the traditional DW/BI, the technology drives the business decisions. It is mostly "after the fact" analysis. This is in contrast to the RFID-enabled DW/BI systems, where the business will drive the DW/BI technology and reporting decisions to be made. This need is facilitated by the explosion of the RFID-enabled data volumes, while at the same time demanding online and on-demand analysis to generate Information and even interpretation using rule-based semantic technologies.

Another reason is that once RFID technology pervades our real world, there will be many social and controversial issues. It is possible to scan the contents of the house or do surveillance and other nefarious purposes unrelated to the supply chain inventory functions in commercial and personal situations. For this reason, DW/BI technologies will be useful to do both the proactive and reactive analysis to detect such events and initiate appropriate actions from a security standpoint.

There are many real-life situations where RFID technology can be used. RFID tags can be embedded in the Passports for e-identification and ease of information sharing between authorities. Transport payments such as the use of toll roads can be done using RFID tags. RFID tags are used in the automotive industry for security and identification purposes. RFID tags are implanted in animals for better identification and tracking. Smart cards embedded with RFID chips are used as electronic cash. RFID is even being used in human implants, patient identification systems and even for tracking antisocial elements post-release into - society. Each of these situations will necessitate proactive and reactive analysis, which only robust and mature technologies such as BI/DW can perform.

RFID-enabled BI/DW systems are crucial to bringing about a paradigm shift in the way we capture, process and report information about our real-life situations. Some of these paradigm-shifting BI/DW concepts that will be developed for the RFID-enabled BI/DW initiative will evolve over time to match the more futuristic wireless technology options that will be used in the BI/DW information-processing world. In conclusion, RFID will subject every dimension of our lives to analysis mainly using new and existing BI/DW techniques, thus pulling the DW from being the "backroom powerhouse" to the "center stage jockey."


Harikrishna S. Aravapalli is a senior technical architect at SETLABS, Infosys and has 13 years of experience in databases, data warehouses and business intelligence technologies. He worked for Wipro and Accenture prior to Infosys. He may be reached at harikrishna_sa@infosys.com.

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