The farmer menu also permits viewing the complete animal
record and includes the following action categories:
• birth
• newborn animal tagging process
• weaning
• milk production observation
• wool production observation
• animal weighing
• animal nutrition
• ethology observation
• leave from farm (sale, loss, theft).
2.5.2. RFID management
The RFID subsystem comprises two parts: the RFID reader and
– possibly – writer and the RFID tag (or transponder). The RFID
reader/writer is either embedded or attached to the mobile device
(PDA, PocketPC), while the RFID tag is placed on the animal. As mentioned
in the introduction, there are three main types of RFID tags
in terms of shape and animal body parts where they are attached:
ruminal boluses, ear tags, and injectable glass tags. In a technological
regard, however, RFID tags could be separated into two different
categories: rewritable and non-rewritable.
Non-rewritable tags only contain the animal identification number
(animal ID). ISO 11784 standard determines the exact way,
in which these IDs should be constructed and what information
each segment represents (e.g. constructor of tag, country of animal
breeding, etc.). Reading this ID results in the unique identification
of each animal.
Rewritable tags, on the other hand, can be written upon. In the
proposed platform, rewritable tags contain, apart fromthe ID, some
additional basic information about the animal, which may be useful
in case of animal loss. If therefore the animal is found by a third
party (perhaps another farmer), reading the content of the RFID
tag will supply some basic information, which could contribute to
tracing the owner and to preventing problems from arising by the
animal’s temporary stay in a foreign environment. Since the available
memory of the tag is limited, though, it is possible to store
until merely 16 characters. This fact imposes not only careful selection
of the kind of information that will be written in the tag, but
also appropriate “encoding” of these data. The proposed segmentation
and encoding for each character of the string in the tag is as
follows:
The first six characters are further segmented into three groups
of two characters each: