Abstract
Imagine a world where boxes talk to containers, containers talk to trucks and trucks talk to forklifts that talk to people. Each box would be smart, carrying all the information about its contents, its shipping history, its handling instructions, and where it is supposed to be. This world is within our reach as a result of Web 2.0 innovations on the Internet. While technologies such as RFID, GPS, cellular phones and barcodes have become ever more prevalent in the freight supply chain, there is still an invisible curtain blocking information flow between proprietary and legacy enterprise systems.
Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) are working with academia, the U.S. Government, and commercial companies to apply Web 2.0 technologies to the challenge of tracking and monitoring hazardous materials and nuclear sources in the international supply chain. Under the rubric of Tracking 2.0, a term for the use of Web 2.0 technologies for tracking applications, ORNL is developing a prototype called IntelligentFreight. IntelligentFreight interfaces sensors, legacy databases, and proprietary commercial tracking systems. The prototype combines Web 2.0’s social networking and tagging concepts with a classical faceted classification (a way of describing the same object in multiple ways) model to track a shipment across incompatible enterprise systems.
