Designing EPCIS through Linked Data and REST principles

The EPC Information Service (EPCIS) is a set of specifications defined by the EPC Global Network and aimed at enabling heterogeneous applications to share EPC-related data, both within and across enterprises. The standard specifies the EPCIS Capture and Query Interfaces by leveraging HTTP binding and WS* specifications. In this paper we investigate how some emerging Web of Data paradigms could be exploited in order to ease the collaboration and exchange of EPC-related data across enterprises. These paradigms, namely Linked Data and the REST architectural style, are relatively recent and, while both have roots on the Web, their mutual relation is still matter of study. Here we discuss how they can complement each other to ease the collaboration and information exchange across enterprises in the EPCIS domain. For such a purpose we refer to a framework, called InterDataNet (IDN) that we conceived and developed to ease the realization of the Web of Data vision by leveraging complementary aspects of Linked Data and RESTful services. We then discuss how IDN capabilities can be exploited to actually build collaborative web-based applications based on EPCIS-related data exchange and handling.