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

What is this patent about?

’520 is related to the field of data management and information retrieval, specifically focusing on systems that track, store, and organize data generated by identification tags. In modern supply chains and monitoring environments, tags such as RFID, GPS, and sensors produce vast amounts of disparate data across different repositories. The background context involves the difficulty of unifying this fragmented information to answer complex queries about an object’s history, location, and its relationship to other objects or environmental conditions.

The underlying idea behind ’520 is the creation of a unified data structure that links physical or abstract entities to their digital footprints through a common tag identifier. The invention recognizes that while data for a single item may be scattered across a manufacturer’s database, a distributor’s log, and real-time sensor feeds, the tag identifier serves as a universal join key. By crawling these diverse repositories and aggregating the information into a reorganized data space, the system can perform high-level reasoning and ranking based on how entities reference one another.

The claims of ’520 focus on a method and system for accessing, linking, and ranking tag-related data from multiple repositories. The independent claims specify a process of retrieving data associated with entities and tags, using the tag identifier to bridge these datasets—specifically to provide location information for an entity based on its associated tag. Crucially, the claims cover a mechanism for responding to queries or keyword searches by determining which tag identifiers satisfy the request and then ranking those identifiers based on their internal tag references.

In practice, the invention utilizes a crawling subsystem to discover and authenticate data from various sources, such as PML files or relational databases. This data is then processed by a reorganization subsystem that builds specialized indices—including spatial and temporal indices—to handle mobile objects and time-varying sensor data. This allows the system to resolve complex, multi-step queries, such as identifying food items that were within a specific distance of a chemical shipment at a particular point in time, even if that data originated from entirely different owners.

This approach differs from prior solutions and standard web search engines by moving beyond simple link-matching to true content aggregation. While a traditional search engine might return a list of separate web pages containing a keyword, this invention identifies that different data files belong to the same physical object via the tag identifier and merges them. Furthermore, the use of a tag-ranking algorithm allows the system to prioritize results based on the importance or frequency of references within the tag network, similar to how page-ranking works for the web but applied to the physical internet of things.