Publishing and Discovering Information and Services for Tagged Products 

Christof Roduner and Marc Langheinrich Institute for Pervasive Computing, ETH 
Zurich, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland 

Abstract 

Radio frequency identification (RFID), and more recently the development of 
Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, have popularized the idea of 
linking real-world products with online information and services. Apart from 
early prototypes, however, the benefits of such automated identification 
technologies have so far been mostly available to industry, rather than 
consumers. With the next generation of mobile phones capable of reading both 
traditional bar codes through their integrated cameras, as well as RFID tags 
using the NFC standard, end-users themselves could take full advantage of such 
ubiquitous identification labels, given novel information architectures that 
go beyond simple web pages or industrial enterprise resource planning (ERP) 
systems. In this paper, we presents an open lookup infrastructure that allows 
commercial, public, and private entities to easily provide information and 
services associated with tagged items, thus facilitating the rapid development 
and deployment of applications based on everyday products.