Computing in the Cloud: Possession and ownership of data

The following video is provided by UChannel, a collection of public affairs lectures, panels and events from academic institutions all over the world. This video was taken at a conference held at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy on January 14, 2008. The conference was sponsored by Microsoft.

What you will see is a panel and discussion format moderated by Ed Felten, Director of the CITP. The panel members are:

1. Joel Reidenberg, Professor of Law, Fordham University
2. Timothy B. Lee, blogger at Technology Liberation Front and adjunct scholar, Cato Institute
   
3. Marc Rotenberg, Executive Director, Electronic Privacy Information Center
   

Here is a paragraph descriptive of the questions addressed by the panel. 

"In cloud computing, a provider's data center holds information that would more traditionally have been stored on the end user's computer. How does this impact user privacy? To what extent do users "own" this data, and what obligations do the service providers have? What obligations should they have? Does moving the data to the provider's data center improve security or endanger it?"

The video, entitled "Computing in the Cloud: Possession and ownership of data", is useful and timely. And the panel is well constructed.

Tim Lee, who readily states that he is not a lawyer, very much serves as an apologist for the online companies who believe that "total, one-hundred percent online privacy would mean ... that there wouldn't be any online [sharing] services at all" (Video Time ~ 2:07).

The online services Lee briefly touches upon by way of example are the ubiquitous use of Web cookies for collecting a wide variety of information about usage of the Internet by online users (~5:30), Google's Gmail which employs a business model of examining contents of users' e-mail and tailoring advertising presented to users (~8:05), Facebook's News Feed service which permits users to keep track of changes to their 'friends' accounts, and Facebook's Beacon service which sends data from external websites to Facebook accounts for the purpose of allowing targeted advertisements (~10:54).

Joel Reidenberg, a professor of law, believes that the distinction between government and the private sector loses its meaning when we think of computing in the cloud (~ 15:10), but that the prospect of cloud computing also reinforces the need for fair information practice standards (~16:00). He is of the opinion that as computing moves into the cloud it will be easier to regulate centralized gate-keepers by law and/or by technical standards (~23:50).

• This is my first 'take away' from this video clip in that Professor Reidenberg reinforces the need for centralized standard setting bodies as I concluded in Portability, Traceability and Data Ownership - Part IV.
  

Marc Rotenberg, also a law professor, emphasizes that without user anonymity, and without transparency provided by the online companies, there will be no privacy for users in the cloud (~29:47 - 37:20). And in doing so Rotenberg challenges Tim Lee for his statement that there cannot be complete user privacy for online companies to provide the services they provide (~33.30). This actually makes for the most interesting exchanges of the video from the 38:00 minute mark to the 44:00 minute mark. 

There is also an interesting dialogue regarding the application of the Fourth Amendment. One of the conference attendees asked the panel why there had been no mention of the Fourth Amendment in any of their presentations. Here is the response from Reidenberg at the 53:30 mark:

"Cloud computing is threatening the vitality of the Fourth Amendment ... [because] the more we see centralization of data [by private, online companies], and the more that data is used for secondary purposes, the easier it is for the government to gain access outside the kind of restraints we put on states in the Fourth Amendment."

In other words, why should the government worry about overcoming Fourth Amendment hurdles about confiscating a person's data when it can sit back and relatively easily purchase or otherwise obtain the same personal data from the big online companies? And do so even in real-time? Why, indeed.

For me, the second 'take away' from this video is found in another cogent comment by Professor Reidenberg at the 88:53 mark:

"The [online] company that ... figures out ways of ... building into [its] compliance systems ... [privacy] compliance mechanisms ... will be putting itself at a tremendous competitive advantage for attracting the services to operate in [the cloud computing environment]."

The technological data ownership discussed and described in Portability, Traceability and Data Ownership - Part IV, supra, is a privacy compliance mechanism.

For those who are interested in the legalities and government policies revolving around burgeoning data ownership issues related to software as a service, the Semantic Web and Cloud Computing, and who are motivated to sit through a 90 minute presentation, here is the video clip ....

Update on Thursday, June 5, 2008 at 12:09PM by Steve Holcombe

In the United States, and notwithstanding the impotency of the Fourth Amendment protections against government search and seizure, it is an irony that the growing centralization of the Cloud may well render it more amenable to government regulation and lawsuit liability.

"Cloud computing opens doors for privacy enhancements [driven by regulation]. It's easier to target for regulation by law or by technical configuration [the] gatekeepers. So to the extent there is a central management, they're easier to find, they're easier to regulate, and they're easier to hold liable than distributed systems."

Quoting Reidenberg at the 23:50m mark.

Data Portability, Traceability and Data Ownership - Part IV

[return to Part III]

Connecting Portability to Traceability

Let’s begin this final part with a nicely presented video interview of Tim Berners-Lee, the widely acclaimed inventor of the World Wide Web, by Technology Review.

Video: Tim Berners-Lee on the Semantic Web
Technology Review (March, 2007)
Clicking on this link opens the video in a separate window for an 8 min 24 sec video.
Close that window when the video is complete and you'll be returned here.

 
Berners-Lee has a degree in physics from The Queen’s College, Oxford. He well expresses in the video the insight of an academic technologist preaching the benefits of the emerging Semantic Web as, essentially, one big, connected database.

For instance, Berners-Lee discusses life sciences not once but twice during this interview in the context of making more and better semantically connected information available to doctors, emergency responders and other healthcare workers. He sees this, and rightly so, as being particularly important to fight both (a) epidemics and pandemics, and (b) more persistent diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s. Presumably that means access to personal health records. However, there is no mention in this interview about concerns over the ownership of information.

Here’s a more recent interview excerpt in March, 2008, initiated by interviewer Paul Miller of ZDNet, in which Berners-Lee does acknowledge data ownership fear factors.

Miller (03:21): “You talked a little bit about people's concerns … with loss of control or loss of credibility, or loss of visibility. Are those concerns justified or is it simply an outmoded way of looking at how you appear on the Web?”

Berners-Lee: “I think that both are true. In a way it is reasonable to worry in an organization … You own that data, you are worried that if it is exposed, people will start criticizing [you] ….

So, there are some organizations where if you do just sort of naively expose data, society doesn't work very well and you have to be careful to watch your backside. But, on the other hand, if that is the case, there is a problem. [T]he Semantic Web is about integration, it is like getting power when you use the data, it is giving people in the company the ability to do queries across the huge amounts of data the company has.

And if a company doesn't do that, then, it will be seriously disadvantaged competitively. If a company has got this feeling where people don't want other people in the company to know what is going on, then, it has already got a problem ….

Well actually, it would expose... all these inconsistencies. Well, in a way, you (sic) got the inconsistencies already, if it exposes them then actually it helps you. So, I think, it is important for the leadership in the company … to give kudos to the people who provided the data upon which a decision was made, even though they weren't the people who made the decision.” (emphasis added)

Elsewhere in this ZDNet interview, Berners-Lee announces that the core pieces for development of the Semantic Web are now in place (i.e., SPARQL, RDF, URI, XML, OWL, and GRDDL). But, again, what I find lacking is that these core pieces do not by themselves provide a mechanism for addressing data ownership issues.

I wish I could introduce Berners-Lee to Marshall Van Alstyne.

Actually, they may already know each other. Like Berners-Lee, Van Alstyne is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Van Alstyne is an information economist whose work in the area of data ownership I have greatly admired for some time (though I have yet to have had the pleasure of making his acquaintance).

There are other noteworthy recent papers by Van Alstyne but, since I first came across it several years ago, I have continued to be enamored with the prescience of a 1994 publication he co-authored entitled, Why Not One Big Database? Ownership Principles for Database Design. Here’s my favorite quote from that paper.

“The fundamental point of this research is that ownership matters. Any group that provides data to other parts of an organization requires compensation for being the source of that data. When it is impossible to provide an explicit contract that rewards those who create and maintain data, "ownership" will be the best way to provide incentives. Otherwise, and despite the best available technology, an organization has not chosen its best incentives and the subtle intangible costs of low effort will appear as distorted, missing, or unusable data.” (emphasis added)

Whether they know each other or not, the reason I would want to see them introduced is that I don’t hear Van Alstyne’s socio-economic themes in the voice of Berners-Lee. In fact I have checked out the online biographies provided by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) of the very fine team that Berners-Lee, as the head of W3C, has brought together. I find no references to academic degrees or experiential backgrounds in either sociology or economics. The W3C team is heavily laden with technologists.

And, why not? After all, the mission of the W3C is one of setting standards for the technological marvel that is the World Wide Web. One must set boundaries and bring focus to any enterprise or endeavor, and Berners-Lee has reasonably done so by directing the W3C team to connect the data that society is either already providing, albeit free of data ownership concerns (i.e., the information already available in massively populated government databases, academic databases, or other publicly accessible sources).

It’s just that I wish there was some cross-pollination going on between the W3C and the likes of Van Alstyne that was resulting, for instance, in something like author-controlled XML (A-XML) as exampled in Parts II and III, above (and, again, below).

That the W3C is not focusing on data ownership is an opportunity for the likes of Dataportability.org. Similarly, as mentioned in Part III, above, in the world of supply chains a likely candidate for a central ‘any product data bank’ would be EPCglobal, the non-profit supply chain consortium. But EPCglobal is a long way from focusing on the kind of data ownership proposed in this writing, or perhaps even envisioning as an organization that they might want to do so.

Like EPCglobal within the ecology of supply chains, Dataportability.org has seated at its table some very powerful members of the social networking ecology (i.e., Google, Plaxo, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, SixApart and Microsoft). There is a critical mass in those members that provides an opportunity for an organization like Dataportability.org to become a neutral, central data bank for portable information among its members for the benefit of social networking subscribers.

For instance, for e-mail addresses desired by a Facebook subscriber to be portable to other social networking websites, Facebook would add tools to the subscriber's interface for seamless registration of the e-mail addresses with a central, portability database branded with Facebook's trademark (but in fact separately administered by Dataportability.org).  The subscriber would merely enter the chosen e-mail addresses into his or her interface, click on the 'register' button, and automatically author the following draft XML object ...

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<PortabilityDictionary_DraftElements>
<emailaddr>noname01@pardalis.com</emailaddr>
<emailaddr>noname02@pardalis.com</emailaddr>
<emailaddr>noname03@pardalis.com</emailaddr>
</PortabilityDictionary_DraftElements>

... which would come to be registered in the central portability 'bank' (again, administered by Dataportability.org) as the following XML object.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<PortabilityDictionary_RegisteredElements>

<emailaddr UniquePointer =
" http://www.centralportabilitybank.org/email_IDs/21263 "/>

<emailaddr UniquePointer =
" http://www.centralportabilitybank.org/email_IDs/21264 "/>

<emailaddr UniquePointer =
" http://www.centralportabilitybank.org/email_IDs/21265 "/>

</PortabilityDictionary_RegisteredElements>

Again, as illustrated in Part III, above, this would set the stage for a viable model for Dataportability.org, as a non-profit consortium managed by the likes of Facebook, Flickr, etc., to provide more than just portability services. Now, with a centralized registry service for A-XML objects (i.e., author-controlled, informational objects) the portability service could easily be stretched into a non-collaborative data authoring and sharing service.

IP Comment: Compare and contrast the collaborative data authoring and sharing systems illustrated by Xerox's US Patent 5,220,657, Updating local copy of shared data in a collaborative system Φ and eiSolutions' US Patent 6,240,414, Method of resolving data conflicts in a shared data environment.

And, again, the 'data ownership' service would presumably be branded by each of the distributed ‘bank members’ (like Facebook, Flikr, etc.) as their own service.

What might this data ownership service entail? To instill confidence in subscribers that they ‘own’ their portable data, what could be provided to members by Facebook, Flickr, etc. as part of the data ownership service made possible by the central Dataportability.org?

For instance: 

• Each time an administrative action is taken by Dataportability.org affecting the registered data object - or a granular data element within a registered object - the subscriber could choose to be automatically notified with a fine-grained report.
  
• Each time the registered data object is shared - or data elements within the object are granularly shared - according to the permissions established by the subscriber, he or she could choose be immediately, electronically notified with a fine-grained report.
• Online, on-demand granular information traceability reports (i.e., fine-grained reports mapping out who accesses or uses a subscribers shared information)
• Catastrophe data back-up services
• etc. 

Thus could Dataportability.org light a data ownership pathway for both the W3C and EPCglobal. 

Concluding Remarks 

The fundamental point of this multi-entry blog is that data ownership matters. With it, the Semantic Web stands the best chance for reaching its full potential for the porting of records between and among social networking sites, and for the tracking and discovering of information along both information and product supply chains.

And holding that positive thought in mind, it’s time to end this writing with a little portability rock n’ roll. It's courtesy of Danny Ayers. Enjoy!

Update on Thursday, June 5, 2008 at 2:28PM by Steve Holcombe

Of relevant interest is the blog entry, Empathic Web, posted by Zach Beauvais to Nodalities on 3 June 2008 -

This concept: empathy at a distance or a digitally-connected community, made me consider the connections in the Semantic Web. The in’s and out’s of the SemWeb have been argued, discussed, debated, and explored technologically. Many blogs and sites have huge amounts of content devoted to the definitions of SPARQL and RDF. Abstractions have been published discussing the applications of this new technology. Sir Tim Berners-Lee refers to the Semantic Web as ‘The Web done right.’

But, what is being done right? Is the Semantic Web the Web done technologically right? Is it an upgrade to the existing framework or a patch to fix what was wrong? Maybe. But it makes me wonder about looking at this from a sociological or communicative perspective. The Semantic Web, technologically, is important to humanity only so far as it’s a medium for our connections.

Dataportability, Traceability and Data Ownership - Part III

[Return to Part II]

The Value Proposition of Data Ownership

Thanks to Henry Story for stopping by to comment on the XML object examples offered in Part II.

"Yes, unique identifiers are very helpful. But numbers rarely uniquely identify anything. Replace your numbers above with URIs (Universal Resource Identifiers) and you have not only a proven system of unique IDs, you also have (especially with http URIs) a well understood way of dereferencing the information. Then you no longer need a specialised name server. This is what the web part of the semantic web is about [which I wrote about in the Sun Bablefish blog entitled hyperdata posted September 20, 2007]. You then move out of supply chains, into supply networks, which I wrote up in another blog [entitled Supply Networks posted April 19, 2007]." (emphasis added)

The end-game goal of the emerging Semantic Web is to interconnect data so that it becomes a ‘hyperdata’ machine. Nonetheless, as Story has previously propounded, there is more to it than technology. There is also the need for policies or other non-technological means that address “who should see what data, who should be able to copy that data, and what they should be able to do with it.”

For some people the Semantic Web will be a technological wonder to behold. Others will be scared stiff by it. Many will feel both awe and trepidation. But not to be forgotten is that people matter more than the Web, itself. A Semantic Web that people view as outside of their control will be a machine that can only become a shadow of its full potential because people, businesses and, yes, even governments will not fully participate.

Previously, in Banking on Granular Information Ownership I offered this.

"People are comfortable and familiar with monetary banks. That’s a good thing because without people willingly depositing their money into banks, there would be no banking system as we know it. Banks need access to people’s money into order to make profits. Without a healthy monetary banking system our economies would be comparatively dysfunctional, and our personal lives would be critically deficient in opportunities."

The same thing can be said about the emerging Semantic Web. People will need to be made comfortable and familiar with the Semantic Web. Without people willingly depositing their information to this new Web, it will fall far short of its inherent capacity for growth.

Moreover, the Semantic Web will need access to people’s information in order make profits, no matter what the business model is. The opportunities for the Semantic Web to enrich our economies and our personal lives will be diminished without ‘buy in’ by the people whom it is envisioned to serve. The value proposition of data ownership is that it provides the most acceptable technological and socio-political pathway for adoption by ordinary people of the emerging Semantic Web.

It is because people matter more than the Web that ‘specialized name servers’ will play a large role. Using the hypothetical domain name ‘www.toydatabank.org’ I have added the following A-XML example to the continuum of examples begun in Part II. I have wrapped some of the following lines of code, and inserted spacing, for easier reading.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<Pedigree>

<PedigreeID UniquePointer =
" http://www.toydatabank.org/toymfg/Object_IDs/99087 "/>

<ManufacturerID UniquePointer =
" http://www.toydatabank.org/toymfg/mfg_IDs/00372 "/>

<ProductSerialNumber UniquePointer =
" http://www.toydatabank.org/toymfg/element_IDs/43229 "/>

<ProductDescription UniquePointer =
" http://www.toydatabank.org/toymfg/element_IDs/23444 "/>

<ProductInfoToSupplyChain UniquePointer =
" http://www.toydatabank.org/toymfg/element_IDs/66221 "/>

<ProductInfoToGovtRegulator UniquePointer =
" http://www.toydatabank.org/toymfg/element_IDs/66333 "/>

<Permissions UniquePointer =
" http://www.toydatabank.org/toymfg/Permissions_IDs/37911 "/>

<!-- Manufacturer information sharing permissions -->
<OtherData>Document Type Definitions</OtherData>
</Pedigree>

Combine a specialized name server with a centralized dictionary of uniquely identified (and standardized) data elements, a centralized registry of A-XML informational objects, an author-controlled permissions database, a distributed A-XML editor/reader and you have the essential components of what I call a supply chain ‘data bank’.

What does a data bank do? It depends on the supply chain, the social network or, as Henry Story has very neatly coined, the ‘supply network’. The white paper, Banking on Granular Information Ownership, covers much of this territory in a less technological manner with examples applicable to personal health records, food safety, product tracking, people tracking, and transactional tracking.

However, I want to add that - conceptually - the connatural, non-collaborative disposition of technological data ownership is a perfect compliment to the approach that Wikipedia has taken in fostering the collaborative authoring of encyclopedic entries. I say ‘conceptually’ because Wikipedia’s entries are collaborative though non-structured. But what if Wikipedia’s collaborative processes and methods for approving unstructured information were applied to structured information?

That is, what if the information account holders of a toy data bank were empowered to collaboratively add to their data bank’s dictionary of structured data elements so that all account holders may then draw upon them non-collaboratively for the A-XML objects each account holder authors and controls?

Consider that a supply chain member of the toy data bank wishes to add to our toy product pedigree example in Part II the language in red.

Product Pedigree Document
Manufacturer ID = Safe Toy Company
Product Serial Number = STOY991
Product Description = Painted Toy
Product Info To Supply Chain = 0% lead in paint
Product Info To Govt Regulator = Less than 600ppm of lead in paint by weight
Product Child Labor = No child labor used

The supply chain participant, using the toy data bank’s XML editor, authors a draft of the following XML data object  …

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<ToyDictionary_DraftElements>
<ToyProductChildLabor>No child labor used</ToyProductChildLabor>
</ToyDictionary_DraftElements>

… that - if adopted by the toy data bank – will be deposited into a standardized toy data bank ‘dictionary’ of XML structured data elements. These would then be available for A-XML authoring by any toy supply chain participant who is a member of the toy data bank. Again, I have wrapped some of the following lines of code, etc., for easier reading.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<ToyDictionary_RegisteredElements>

<ToyProductChildLabor UniquePointer =
" http://www.toydatabank.org/toymfg/element_IDs/12637 "/>

</ToyDictionary_RegisteredElements>

And taking the ‘data bank’ analogy one step further. Let’s say that the adoption of the ‘Product Child Labor’ data element by the toy data bank involves the alternative approval of a central ‘product data bank’ overseeing a larger standardized ‘dictionary’ applicable to products of all kinds (e.g., toys, pharmaceuticals, livestock, food, etc.).

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<AnyProductDictionary_RegisteredElements>

<AnyProductChildLabor UniquePointer =
" http://www.anyproductdatabank.org/prodmfg/element_IDs/73621 "/>

</AnyProductDictionary_RegisteredElements>

In the world of supply chains, a likely candidate for such a central ‘any product data bank’ would be EPCglobal, the private, standards setting consortium governed by very large organizations like Cisco Systems, Wal-Mart, Hewlett-Packard, DHL, Dow Chemical Company, Lockheed Martin, Novartis Pharma AG, Johnson & Johnson, Sony Corporation and Proctor & Gamble. EPCglobal is architecting essential, core services for tracking physical products identified by unique electronic product codes (including RFID tags) across and within enterprise systems controlled by large organizations.

The crux of this multi-entry blog is that data ownership – that is, technological data ownership – paradoxically provides a non-technological ‘something more’ that will be a necessary ingredient to the emerging Semantic Web. It will do so by empowering supply chain participants with non-collaborative authoring of granular, structured informational objects that may remain within the visibility and control of the author even as they are shared within a complex supply chain.

And with that, I think I have pretty much all the pieces I need for a final Part IV.

[continued in Part IV]

EPCglobal & Prescription Drug Tracking

Andrew Pollack authored an article in the New York Times on March 26, 2008 entitled California Delays Plan to Track Prescription Drugs.

"In a reprieve for the pharmaceutical industry, California regulators agreed on Tuesday to delay by two years a requirement that all prescription drugs be electronically tracked as a means of thwarting counterfeiting.....

The California plan would require that drugs be tracked electronically from the manufacturer through the wholesaler to the pharmacy. Each bottle of pills sold to a pharmacy would have to have a unique serial number, encoded in a bar code or a radio-frequency identification tag.....

Pharmaceutical manufacturers [said that] putting a unique serial number on each container would require changing their packaging lines, which would cost millions of dollars and take years. […] Pharmacies and wholesalers, meanwhile, said they could not install the software and the equipment needed to read the serial numbers until they knew what systems the drug manufacturers would use."

Though not directly identified in Pollack's article, EPCglobal is a leader in establishing standards in the area of drug tracking. EPCglobal is a private, standards setting consortium governed by very large organizations like Cisco Systems, Wal-Mart, Hewlett-Packard, DHL, Dow Chemical Company, Lockheed Martin, Novartis Pharma AG, Johnson & Johnson, Sony Corporation and Proctor & Gamble. EPCglobal is architecting essential, core services for tracking physical products identified by unique electronic product codes (including RFID tags) across and within enterprise systems controlled by large organizations.

I submitted a comment to EPCglobal on January 22, 2008 about EPCglobal's Architecture Framework. You will see that the comment is addressed to Mark Frey who courteously and immediately responded that he had forwarded it to EPCglobal's Architectural Review Committee.

This is a 10 page comment (including exhibits) about broader data ownership issues than just those relating to electronic pedigree documentation for use by pharmaceutical supply chain. But see the first full paragraph on page 5 where I said:

“[W]hile EPCglobal has begun establishing forward-looking standards relative to electronic pedigree documentation for use by pharmaceutical supply chain participants [see EPCglobal Pedigree Ratified Standard Version 1.0 as of January 5, 2007], it has yet to include these standards within the EPCglobal Architecture Diagram.

With this comment I am proposing, by way of an illustrative example, that the methods developed by Pardalis within its IP may be used to derive essential specifications for connecting the current EPCglobal (EPCIS) Architecture with its ePedigree standards for the pharmaceutical industry."

The illustrative example referred to above is a mock Common Point Authoring (CPA) informational object. This illustrative example has a reference point beginning with a granular EPCglobal ePedigree document. The represented CPA informational object is the EPCglobal ePedgiree document that has been further granularized with mock XML tagging containing unique identifiers pointing to a CPA registered data element database.

My point is that EPCglobal has yet to develop standards for ePedigree document exchange that may be efficiently, flexibly and cost-effectively applied to the pharmaceutical supply chains for helping to reduce counterfeiting. Given the players who comprise EPCglobal, it is reasonable to presume that California regulators have essentially backed off enforcing their anti-counterfeiting regulations because EPCglobal has yet to catch up to the California plan. The plan was to take effect January 1, 2009. Now it has been pushed back to 2011.

Update on Thursday, May 29, 2008 at 1:54PM by Steve Holcombe

From the Economist's Economic & Financial Indicators section:

"Custom seizures of counterfeit goods rose by 17% in the EU last year, according the European Commission."

Source: The Economist crediting European Commission

"The number of cases has grown rapidly since 2003, but fewer fake articles were confiscated last year than in 2006—perhaps because internet sales have boosted the number of small consignments. Indeed, 70% of cases involved air-express courier or mail. Cigarettes and clothing accounted for more than half the sham gear seized. China was the source of almost 60% of dodgy goods. Switzerland and India account for three-quarters of the trade in fake drugs, which rose by 51% last year. Treatments for erectile dysfunction—phoney Viagra pills—were the most common counterfeit medicines." [emphasis added]

Update on Sunday, April 4, 2010 at 9:07PM by Steve Holcombe

"Discovery services" (See the EPCGlobal Standards Overview at http://www.epcglobalinc.org/standards) has been gray in color for the two years since I published this blog entry. And I am informed by a knowledgeable source that it will probably be another two years before they arrive at any definitive standards (if then).