Re: Results of our RFID Online Meet-up [4][What is ALE? ]

Question

The ALE (Application Link Enabling)is a business solution to a very real need emerging in the SAP market. This is the need for businesses to move towards tighter integration between systems, yet, at the same time, provide independence to the various business units within the company.
It allows distribution of your applications across several SAP systems, such that centralized functions, as well as decentralized functions can operate in the same company arena maintain and distribute master data elements from a central system, thus maintaining unique number ranges across several systems maintain and distribute control data objects from a central system, thus synchronizing important configuration data. This is important when trying to decentralise functions, yet keep them integrated two R/3 systems, in some instances
couple SAP and external systems. We have used ALE to maintain the ORganization chart between two different Production systems.

Answer 1

Application Level Events (ALE) is a standard created by <b>EPCGlobal, Inc.</b>, an organization of industry leaders devoted to the development of standards for the Electronic Product Code (EPC) and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technologies.
In Simple terms
1. Gathering : Business Objects from multiple data sources
2. Cumulating : using Filters, Templates, Counting, and categorization wrt Time  Interval
3. Reporting : As per requirement and business need
ALE has been successfully defined by EPC Global Inc.
The ALE specification is a developer's specification indicating required functionality and behavior, as well as a common API expressed through XML Schema Definition (XSD) and Web Services Description Language (WSDL).
The main aim to define the ALE specification is, a way to provided aggregation and filtering of tag data over a period of time. An ALE server allows one to specify when to start collecting data, when to stop collecting data, how to organize and sort the business objects within that specific category, when to send the data to required destinations. An ALE client allows one to communicate with any compatible ALE server to where data requirements are defined and information (reports) generated.
ALE provides networked sensors devices and RFID readers to interact in a service-oriented environment. The technology allows users place much of the data processing and business events closer to the network edge and as per business requirements.
Previously, when an enterprise system wanted information from the RFID system, it would have to process all the data from the readers and do the calculation.
With ALE in the middleware, the application can simply make a Web services request, which is processed by chips in the readers.
So now after coming the ALE Specification to tarck exact business objects is really easy and efficient which is really going to helpful for all EPC Middleware Vendors, Reader Manufacturer, Application Developers and System Integrators.
Cheers
Ashish Chatterjee