News | March 31, 2007

RFID Partnership: Pramari And University Of Arkansas Announce Open Source RFID Partnership

Pramari, one of the, leading provider of open source RFID solutions, and The University of Arkansas, a leader in the education and research of RFID, have announced a strategic partnership to further integrate their RFID Open Source Products and create a comprehensive open source offering for RFID. Under this partnership both organizations will work closely by integrating their products, and leverage their collective knowledge in helping some of the most influential RFID users. With this free exchange of ideas and tools, Pramari and the University of Arkansas seek to create an Open Source community that can further advance RFID infrastructure and create products that fill the needs of the rapidly evolving RFID software market.

Pramari is the founder of Rifidi – the premier RFID simulator. Rifidi provides an advanced eclipse-based development environment that can accurately simulate some of the most popular EPC RFID Readers Rifidi lets developers use virtual ‘Software Defined RFID' readers to build a complete simulated environment to build business processes and test out their RFID application without the expensive costs of hardware.

University of Arkansas is the developer of TagCentric – an agent-based RFID middleware platform. TagCentric in its current form aids the user in gathering tag data from multiple heterogeneous readers and depositing that tag data into a user-specified database; a real-time display of the tag data is also provided. TagCentric supports Alien, Symbol and ThingMagic readers, as well as a virtual ("fake") reader that can synthesize tag data in the absence of a physical reader. Most major databases are supported, including Oracle and MySQL. TagCentric also allows for the printing/encoding of tag data through a Zebra tag printer.

"The RFID industry is at a turning point and software is taking center stage. At the University of Arkansas we are continuing our leadership in this space by increasing our research and development into Open Source RFID" said Dr. Craig Thompson, head of RFID software for University of Arkansas. "Rifidi is a great complement to TagCentric and is very useful for developing RFID applications. It also allows us to develop agents for readers not physically present in our institution"

"This is the true spirit of open source — combining communities and resources in order to enable a better solution for the industry." said Prasith Govin, co-founder and CTO of Pramari. "We're excited to be working with University of Arkansas and adding them to our growing list of supporters. We couldn't ask for a better RFID partner as we continue to expand Rifidi and deliver on our mission of open RFID development."

About Pramari

Pramari, LLC is dedicated to making true production ready Open Source RFID a reality. Created by industry experts in RFID and middleware Pramari is focused on providing RFID developers with a comprehensive toolkit for building innovative RFID applications. Pramari's open source toolkit Rifidi is a top-ranked RFID project on SourceForge with over 1,000 downloads in less than 6 months. Pramari is headquartered in Manchester, CT with offices in Regensburg, Germany. For additional information, please visit www.pramari.com

About TagCentric

For more information about the TagCentric project, see www.tagcentric.info. For more information about the University of Arkansas, see www.uark.edu and www.csce.uark.edu

SOURCE: Pramari