IT TRENDS
Bar codes: smart symbols that speak
ANAND PARTHASARATHY
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Bar codes reinvent themselves to challenge radio tags as a viable tracking technology
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AS THE FIFA World Cup races to its climax on Sunday, analysts are taking stock on how Information Technology has contributed to the smooth running on the world's largest sporting event — a month of football — spanning 12 centres, 64 games, 32 nations and nearly 4 million spectators, officials and volunteers.
Symbolic of the way high tech tools of today, and tomorrow, were deployed is the green coloured ticket that was used — over 3.2 million of them — to provide admission to the various venues. Each ticket was customised for the purchaser, with his or her personal details.
This prevented both counterfeiting and impersonation ensuring that if a ticket was lost or stolen, it could be electronically cancelled, rendering it well nigh impossible for anyone else on the elaborate terrorist and football hooligan watch list to gain admittance.
Allowed rapid check
The information was stored on a paper-thin Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) microchip embedded in the top left hand corner of the ticket and created jointly by Germany-based X-ident Technology and Philips.
At the match venue, hundreds of electronic turnstiles scanned the ticket using the Mifare contact less smart card system and allowed rapid check of the information with the holder's passport.
The ticket infrastructure was integrated with the overall information network for the Games created by U.S.-based communications provider Avaya and half a dozen global partners, so that any breach of the physical or electronic firewall could be handled instantly by the IT command centre deep under the main venue in Munich.
No one wanted the 2006 FIFA Games to go the way of the tragic 1972 Olympics in the same city, which saw terrorists kidnap and kill the entire Israeli team.
Interestingly, almost the same type of RFID technology was deployed in Mumbai during the ongoing football fiesta, albeit at a much smaller event: the SAP Summit `06, the annual Indian developer event of the Germany-based enterprise software leader.
All 4,000 plus delegates were provided RFID-encased badges. This helped the hosts log entry into every session; assess relative popularity of parallel events and cater to the specific professional needs of every delegate.
The solution was provided by IDE Infotech, an Indian partnership between Intellicon, Dexler Information and Essae Technology. The trio came together when they jointly offered an Automatic Data Capture (ADC) solution to the Oil and Natural Gas Commission (ONGC) last year, which has ended up as possibly the largest task of this kind in India.
It involved data capture and logging across 34 sites in the country, onshore and offshore, using wireless networking and feeding ONGC's SAP backbone.
The FIFA ticket is not all RFID. It also includes the more familiar bar code across the bottom — the best proof, if one were required, that the advent of radio tags has not meant that older technologies were about to roll over and die.
Bar codes have been around since June 1974 when a supermarket in Troy, Ohio (U.S.) used it to track sales of packets of Wrigley chewing gum.
The bar code is a machine-readable representation of information in a visual form — most commonly in the widths and spacings of printed parallel lines. These were read and interpreted by basic laser-based scanning devices. Today such code systems have become very common, on the labels of virtually every mass consumer item and Indian shoppers are used to bar code scanning systems in super market checkouts, in the airline tickets that they can book online and print at home, on the back covers of printed books to hold the International Standard Book Number (ISBN)....
But the hunger to store even more information has led to the bar code reinventing itself for a new era: Linear so-called 2-D bar codes, which can boost the information capacity of a given space over ten-fold.
Open standard
Symbol Technologies, a leading player in the bar code business has created an open standard in the public domain known as PDF 417 for 2-D bar coding (This is not to be confused with Acrobat's portable document format).
Another popular and non-proprietary standard is known as Aztec created by Welch Allyn (Now Hand Products).
IDE's ONGC solution as well as its offerings to many Indian corporate customers in the auto, educational and garment industry, have included many 2-D bar code systems ... and we are likely to see a lot more of these tiny thumb-nail sized black and white patterns in daily life.
Increasingly, they come with built-in security features that the linear codes could never hope to offer.
Vying for the big markets
Meanwhile, RFID systems both passive (that is, with no power source in the tag itself) and active (with a tiny battery) are slowly becoming affordable enough to vie for the big inventory markets: Many Indian suppliers to Walmart are already tagging their pallets with RFID — a requirement that this big international buyer mandated in 2005.
But it will be some while before even high priced individual items in Indian shops will have RFID tags — they are too costly to make economic sense.
But football may yet again be the driver: At the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits in Erlangen, Germany, they are already planning for the next FIFA games, four years away.
The football itself as well as the shin guard of every player may have an RFID chip. Readers could be positioned to scan the whole field of play ... to assist referees in deciding about controversial goals and offside penalties.
The next football from Adidas may well be the world's first `smart' ball and football may go, technology-wise, where no cricketing Third Umpire has gone before!
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