Background

Founders

The Fosstrak project was initiated by Christian Floerkemeier, Matthias Lampe, and Christof Roduner of the Distributed Systems Group at ETH Zurich led by Friedemann Mattern and the Auto-ID Lab at ETH Zurich/University of St. Gallen led by Elgar Fleisch .

History

At the Auto-ID Lab and in the Distributed Systems Group at ETH Zurich, we started working on the EPC Network and RFID middleware as early as 2001 through our involvement with the Auto-ID Center, a research program headquartered at MIT to foster the adoption of RFID (more information about the Auto-ID Center). Our early contributions include for example the PML Core language, a mark-up language for Auto-ID events, which was published by EPCglobal in 2003, and the RFIDStack, an RFID middleware that abstracts from the idiosycracies of different reader devices.

In 2005, we decided to make the software packages that we developed over the years to abstract from proprietary reader interfaces, to filter and aggregate RFID data and to interpret the RFID data in a given context publicly available to the RFID community. To foster interoperability, we decided to wrap our existing implementations using the interfaces specified by the EPCglobal working groups, e.g., the reader protocol and EPCIS specification. The project was initially called Accada, but we changed the name to Fosstrak after a trademark dispute.

Motivation

We believe that the availability of openly available software for an RFID infrastructure will benefit the entire community and accelerate the development of an "Internet of Things":

  • EPC Network Novices can use the software and the simple demos we provide to gain hands-on experience with the EPC Network.
  • RFID Application Developers will benefit from the high-level abstractions available in Fosstrak that hide the low-level message and transport bindings. This will simplify the communication with EPC Network components and thus foster the use of the EPC Network.
  • RFID System Integrators can deploy and configure the Fosstrak implementations to their needs.
  • Researchers and students working on RFID do not have to implement the software components themselves, but can rely on existing modules which they can modify to evaluate novel concepts and algorithms.

Team

Project Management Chairs

Contributors and Committers

Name Organization Module
Dominique Guinard ETH Zurich EPCIS Web Adapter
Mark Harrison University of Cambridge TDT Lead
Matthias Lampe Zuehlke Engineering ALE
Marc-Antoine Mouilleron Orange EPCIS, TDT
Benoit Plomion Orange ALE
Wafa Soubra Orange ALE
Marco Steybe Zuehlke Engineering EPCIS Lead
Samuel Wieland ELCA ALE, LLRP Commander
Marco Aurelio Barreto Silva Fosstrak Brazil
Thiago da Silva Menezes Fosstrak Brazil

Fosstrak Alumni

Name Organization
James Brusey University of Cambridge
Arthur van Dorp ETH Zurich
Remo Egli ETH Zurich
Ueli Etter ETH Zurich
Andreas Fuerer ETH Zurich
Andrea Groessbauer ETH Zurich
David Gubler ETH Zurich
Jonas Haller ETH Zurich
Zhang Haoning ETH Zurich
Nikos Kefalakis Athens Information Technology
Adrien Laurence University of Caen
Nektarios Leontiadis
Mathias Mueller University of Fribourg
Patrice Oehen ETH Zurich
Alain Remund ETH Zurich
Angelo Rosenfelder ETH Zurich
Thomas Rudfoss Telenor R&I
Oskar Saiz
Roland Schneider ETH Zurich
Stephen Tan
Geir Vevle
Markus Vitalini ETH Zurich
Sean Wellington
Oliver Zweifel ETH Zurich

Mailing lists

You can find the mailing list for Fosstrak at http://groups.google.com/group/fosstrak.

Previous Mailing Lists

We switched to the Google Groups mailing list in February 2012. Older postings are archived at the following locations:

EPCIS users mailing list http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=accada-epcis-user
EPCIS developers mailing list http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=accada-epcis-developer
ALE mailing list http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=accada-ale-user
TDT mailing list http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum=fosstrak-tdt-user