A2ABlog: Come to Think of It
Our mission is to promote and facilitate information and knowledge sharing in a Web-based anywhere anytime electronic environment.

Notables
  • IoT & Source Tagging Issues
  • An open forum, 'RFID-based Enabling Technology for On-Target Visibility Garment Supply Chains', organized by the Center of Cyber Logistics CUHK, was held in The Chinese University of Hong Kong CUHKon April 27, 2011. View/Download Forum Brochure Brochure. View Project summary RFID Project Summary
  • Plug-and-Sync Visibility - a first SCOR-based view
  • A new book "Integrative Cyber Logistics: Platform, Services & Technology" in the planning New Book
  • Work on activityML is slowly moving along

Trends (according to the word(s) being searched via Google - some words are included for comparative feel)

RFID | Supply Chain Management | iPad2 | Internet of Things | Snoopy |


On-Demand
Any2Any
Services

The Any2Any Idea (Beyond Web 2.0)

It is interesting that our vision "On-demand Any2Any e-Services" is composed of three hyphenated words - yet fittingly convey the right idea of the ensuing technology ahead. Such unintended wordsmithship clearly accentuating the tasks at hand are innovative and, at times, challenging, not of existent work singly, but of fused concepts of new and old. That is, services are enabled in the electronic environment with delivery on-demand facilitating communication channels from any to any.

The origin of the concept does not include any of the words. It is simply a belief that too many duplicates exist in this world, manifested by the WWW. These duplicates each has their own pros and cons. If they can come to as one, then the combined whole would likely be a better one at least. These sharing must be made effective; sharing without physical transport is not easy or simple before the birth of the Web, and the realization of the e-Platform.

A platform is in where people of similar interests gather and share.  An electronic platform (e-Platform) does not require physical co-existence.  Inasmuch a virtual environment that emulates the interaction of people - participants in here - would be sufficient to bring to bear of the knowledge base.  The e-Platform offers characteristics of interactivity, connectivity, interoperability and most importantly integrability, bringing a secure collaborative environment to the participants.

In the e-Platform, other services make easy to deal with well-defined tasks - both primitive and temporally manifested and eventually specialized.  These services, or e-Services, need no pre-requisite of known parties, or number of parties, creating the any-2-any necessity. The nature of the e-Services should be truly on-demand - that is, their existential nature with respective to the e-Platform is defined, at the time, as an indicative need of the participants.

This e-Platform of 'on-demand any2any eServices' covers many areas. We will start with the discussion with respect to two disciplines, hopefully leading to a generalization. The generalization has already pointed to e-Services as 3rd-party e-Services and visibility services. The tie-in of these two concepts required further research. Similar discussion on such topic can be found in 'Service-Dominant Logic or SD Logic' and 'Design Sciences'.

The two disciplines of interests to the authors of this site are 1) AOLA (Author-Once-Learn-Anywhere) e-Learning in the context of Mathematics Education, and 2) e-Business, as in the world of 'Business Chains' with the integrative glue of EPC-RFID (Electronic Product Code-Radio Frequency Identification). Proof-of-concept works are currently underway and some preliminary results will be made available here after April 2011. Results include characterization of 'hotspots' (RFID technology deployed sites at supply chain parties), SCOR-based RFID adoption framework, on-demand visibility, ReBAC model, and push visibility technology framework.

At first glance, the two principal areas of interests do not share commonality that call for the same operating environment as the e-Platform. But yet, the lack of an generalized glue limits the potential leverage of the Web to further developments in uncharted domains, subsequently eliminating duplicacy, realizing on-demand effectiveness with transparent manifestation, and achieving defined efficiency with less barriers.

Definition. Any-2-Any


Of relationship realized between 2 or more parties, of not necessary fore-knowledge of each others; in an electronic environment, the relationship bears the trust nature of connectivity, interactivity, interoperability and integrability.

 

[February 2005]

RFID-Aware e-Business

E-Business gets another booster after on-demand e-Services become one of the purveyors to fully realize the potentials of conducting business on the Web. RFID technology enables pervasive integration of supply chains, and multiple chains of same or dissimilar natures. E-Business must be first become RFID-aware, leading to evolutionary RFID-driven developments and collaborations. Much talks about the full potentials of "Internet of Things," when RFID-tagged "thing" is of lower costs. There are other adoption issues such as privacy & security and visibility services.

or see research summary


Any2Any ePlatform

The idea of an ePlatform is not new in terms of the use of the term. A platform in an electronic environment has been suggested in the literature, and implementations can be found in many references (such as the DTTN in Hong Kong). In here, ePlatform would simply refer to the electronic environment, specifically the Web, where participants of the platform conduct any activity of business nature, in personal or corporate interests. Also, we focus on the design of an ePlatform with respect to the enabling technologies to facilitate communications among participants anywhere, anytime and any place - thus the Any2Any labeling.

A new term e-Service Platform has been circulating around...

or see research summary


AOLA Framework

In an e-Learning environment, accessing multiple materials from different sources is now transparent to both the learners and the teachers. The Web provides the connectivity that allows interactions that are necessary among learners and teachers, mostly on a one-to-one basis. For online learning of mathematics, one has to work not only with mathematics symbols and expressions, but manipulation of the same must be enabled. Desktop-based l mathematics software provides such experience in a standslone environment. Yet, to enhance the learning experience, one requires a frameworks to facilitate the dynamic e-Learning environment for mathematics educations. AOLA (Author-Once-Learn-Anywhere) is one such framework.

or see research summary

<<the work on activityML begins>>

First Tutorial: Installing MySQL 5.x in Mac OS X 10.x