The field deployment of RFID tags has been accelerated by last September’s EPC standards announcement by EPCglobal and Wal-Mart’s tagging mandates. But the EPC is important beyond its use in RFID tags: the “Internet of Things” can and should include intangible things. And the information architecture intended to make an RFID tagging scheme practical will have dismantled one of the major obstacles to product information exchange on the Internet.

It might be healthy for the industry to sharpen the distinctions between three elements: tags, the namespace, and the naming architecture. Almost all of the industry’s focus since the creation of EPCglobal last fall has been on tags. As intangible as the RFID phenomenon is, as an invisible, radio-frequency handshake, tags are something one can appreciate– they have a cost and physical dimensions. But mandates notwithstanding, RFID adoption is likely to come in fits and starts. It may be that some of the physical challenges, e.g., reading tags in cluttered and hostile environments, will render RFID unworkable (or, more importantly, unprofitable) in some of the areas where it has been proposed.

In many ways, the real magic of RFID is in the infrastructure, where a tag’s code can be translated into compact and convenient pointers to sources for information, and the Object Naming Service (ONS) will knit together a richer web of product information.