Method and system for storing, retrieving, and managing data for tags

What is this patent about?

’930 is related to the field of data management and information retrieval systems, specifically focusing on the aggregation of data from distributed identification tags. It addresses the technical challenge of tracking and managing information for objects that move through complex lifecycles, such as supply chains or medical environments, where data is often siloed across disparate repositories. The background context involves the limitations of traditional RFID systems that lack a unified mechanism to synthesize static, dynamic, and temporal data into a coherent historical record.

The underlying idea behind ’930 is the creation of a centralized intelligence layer that treats tag identifiers as the primary keys for a global data structure. Rather than viewing a tag as a simple serial number, the invention treats it as a pointer to a distributed web of information that includes fixed attributes, constantly changing sensor data, and discrete historical events. The key inventive insight is the use of a crawling subsystem to discover and harvest these disparate data points, followed by a reorganization process that links them together to provide a comprehensive view of an object’s state and history.

The claims of ’930 focus on a method and system for accessing, organizing, and ranking tag-related data retrieved from multiple repositories. The independent claims specifically cover the process of linking static, dynamic, and temporal information associated with tag identifiers to reconstruct the full profile of an object. A critical technical feature of the claimed invention is the ability to determine which tag identifiers satisfy a specific query or keyword search and then rank those identifiers based on their tag references, effectively applying a link-analysis logic to physical objects.

In practice, the system functions by monitoring event notifications that trigger data acquisition from various sources, such as manufacturer databases, shipping logs, and environmental sensors. This data is processed into a unified format, such as the Physical Markup Language (PML), allowing the system to resolve complex spatial and temporal queries. For example, it can identify food items that originated in a specific city and were later exposed to certain environmental conditions by correlating the temporal-spatial indices of multiple tagged entities across different ownership domains.

This approach differs from prior solutions by moving beyond simple point-to-point tag reading to a holistic data aggregation model. While traditional systems might only identify a tag's presence at a single reader, ’930 constructs a directed graph of relationships between tags and entities. By ranking results based on the density of tag references—similar to how web search engines rank pages based on hyperlinks—the invention provides a mechanism to identify the most relevant or 'important' objects within a massive dataset of physical events.