GRIFS Project - Welcome

GRIFS Action Plan

Purpose

This document is an update of the deliverable D3.1 of the GRIFS project. It summarises the GRIFS project achievements to date and activities planned for the future.
In order to achieve its objectives, GRIFS is undertaking the following activities.

State of the art report on RFID Standards

The GRIFS project has prepared a 217 page State of the Art report summarising the current standard scene and expanding on the report produced by the CE RFID project titled “Recommendations for European RFID Standardisation Activities”. The GRIFS report is available at http://www.grifs-project.eu/index.php/downloads/en/. The report provides an overview of the existing regional and global standards setting bodies and their standard development processes. The report also categorises and provides basic information about relevant RFID standards and ends with a section on key future drivers, constraints, comparisons and gap analysis.

The project will update this report during 2009 and plans to incorporate the information into an online database accessed over the World Wide Web. The intention is that members of the GRIFS Forum will commit to updating the sections of the database relevant to the standards that their organisations are responsible for. In this way the database will stay relevant and up to date. A demonstration of an early implementation of the GRIFS RFID Standards Database was given at the GRIFS workshop in Brussels on 20th February.
The database should be officially launched in the coming weeks.

Liaison with other EU RFID Projects

GRIFS has been active in liaising with other European RFID projects both to explain the GRIFS project and to gain an understanding of any standards related issues the other projects may have. The project has successfully liaised with all of the identified active European Commission (EC) funded RFID-related projects in both FP6 and FP7, using the EU RFID Cluster CERP-IoT (Cluster of European Research Project on The Internet of Things) http://www.rfid-in-action.eu/cerp .

Liaison with the CASAGRAS project has been particularly close including running joint meetings in Halifax and Hong Kong. A short Memorandum of Understanding outlining how the two projects work together is available on the GRIFS web site.

Information Gathering Workshops

An initial GRIFS workshop was held in Brussels in June 2008.This was followed by workshops in UK, Japan, Hong Kong and Brussels with further workshops, in association with Forum meetings, planned for Beijing, Washington, Seoul and Brussels during 2009. These workshops publicise the GRIFS project, highlight specific RFID topics related to standardisation and most importantly gain commitment to participate in the GRIFS Forum and generate feedback on the way the Forum should be organised.

The workshops were organised with the help of the local GS1 organisations. They were free and open to all and each workshop was attended by around 30 to 50 people. Each workshop has focussed on a specific event topic area and also reviewed which standards related issues may need to be addressed by the GRIFS Forum. The event topics have been selected to be of particular relevance in the location where the workshop is being held. The event topics have been purposely chosen to be non industry specific to encourage standards organisations in different industries to come together and see where their activities might benefit from co-ordination.

The generic agenda for the workshops is shown below although it is subject to modification for specific workshops.

TheGRIFS newsletters, available on the GRIFS web site (http://www.grifs-project.eu/index.php/news/en/), provide a summary of each workshop.


Memorandum of Understanding (MoU)

The organisation of the GRIFS Forum is expected to be governed by an MoU between the organisations participating in the Forum meetings described in the following section.

In creating a draft of a possible M0U for the GRIFS Forum the project looked at a variety of existing MoUs of all sorts ranging from rather specific MoUs about collaboration between 2 standards organisations on a single standard to general co-operation such as FASB and ICANN. The closest fit appeared to be with Electronic Business MoU between IEC, ISO, ITU and UN/ECE which was therefore used as the basis for a draft GRIFS MoU presented at each of the GRIFS workshops.

The feedback on the MoU has generally been positive and has confirmed that an MoU is the right level of agreement for the GRIFS Forum. The next step is to produce a revised draft by the end of March. This draft will then be open for wider consultation during April with the intention that those organisations intending to participate in the GRIFS Forum will sign the MoU during May and June.

The issue of resourcing and funding the GRIFS Forum once the GRIFS project ends at the end of 2009 will be addressed during the development of the MoU and subsequently in meetings of the Forum itself.


GRIFS Forum

Following on from the workshops there will be 4 Forum meetings restricted to those who have committed to participate under the Memorandum of Understanding which will be finalised in May 2009. These Forum meetings will begin to address the co-ordination issues identified through the workshop process. In addition the meetings will address any outstanding organisational issues; especially how the Forum will operate once the input from the GRIFS project ceases.

Open workshops, similar to those which have already taken place, will also be organised in association with the Forum meetings and co located with them. These workshops will continue to promote the GRIFS Forum and to gain input from users and others on which standards areas are most in need of co-ordination.

Dates for the Forum meetings and associated workshops are currently being finalised. However the current plans are for the following meetings:
May 2009, Beijing (TBC)
July 2009, Washington DC (TBC)
September 2009, Seoul (TBC)
November 2009, Brussels (TBC)


Organisations Participating in the Forum

Selecting and motivating organisations to participate in the GRIFS Forum is a major focus for the project. The GRIFS State of the Art report provides a list of those organisations most relevant to involve in the Forum.

Selection criteria for organisations to be invited to participate in the GRIFS Forum are currently being finalised. Possible criteria include breadth and depth of RFID standards development activity, geographical scope and industry sectors covered. A major issue is in what way to include user organisations.


Other Project Activity

In addition to the Sate of the Art Report and the various meetings described above the GRIFS project issues a 6 monthly newsletter, plus 2 annual reports summarising the activities and achievements of the project. These reports plus other information about the project are held on the project’s web site at http://www.grifs-project.eu/index.php/news/en/