Part of security rule HM-232, issued following 9/11 by the Transportation Security Administration, required shippers of radioactive and/or hazardous materials to establish a national system to track such materials.

Eight years later, no ubiquitous system exists, even though about 3 million shipments of radioactive material are made annually, according to the Department of Transportation. Not only are state and local authorities usually completely unaware when radioactive shipments pass through their jurisdictions, when radioactive sources go missing, there is no reliable way to find them. The fear, of course, is that this material could fall into the wrong hands.

An automated radioactive materials tracking system emerging at Oak Ridge (Tenn.) National Laboratory that goes far beyond barcodes, radio-frequency identification (RFID) and GPS may be the answer.

“We’re adopting advanced Web 2.0 technologies to track and monitor nuclear sources floating around in the international supply chain,” said Randy Walker, manager of the Logistics and Transportation Program at Oak Ridge. A prototype called IntelligentFreight is being developed that integrates sensors, legacy databases and proprietary commercial tracking systems with Web 2.0.

(Web 2.0 generally refers to second-generation Web development and design that enhances communication, information-sharing, interoperability and collaboration of Web-based communities. Think Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.)

“IntelligentFreight employs a secured Web 2.0 portal to assign a permanent unique virtual tag to a nuclear source encoded as a web address,” Walker said.

These tags allow authenticated supply chain partners to add data to a virtual bucket using legacy commercial and government information and tracking systems, and to use partial pieces of information to achieve shipment visibility.

Walker told Homeland1 that IntelligentFreight could be a “game changer.”

“The system models the human brain’s process for classifying thoughts and making decisions and applies it to nuclear sources tracking using a process called faceted classification,” he explained.

By assigning multiple tags to an object, faceted classification allows users to search for information in their own ways instead of having to use a computer-generated, predetermined or categorized order.

IntelligentFreight is designed to provide cradle-to-grave tracking. Walker said 99 percent of the information needed by stakeholders already exists, but is trapped in proprietary or stovepiped databases. IntelligentFreight taps these resources by revealing hidden data.

One of the beauties of the IntelligentFreight system is its lightweight code. It merely overlies legacy systems, so there is no need for a company to change anything. For instance, FedEx has a gold-standard tracking system, and IntelligentFreight requires no changes to it.

“During the period of time the object is in the FedEx pipeline, IntelligentFreight provides visibility,” Walker said. When the package is received at, say, the Los Alamos (N.M.) National Laboratory, IntelligentFreight provides tracking visibility through whatever materials-tracking system exists at Los Alamos.

Right now, the technology is being used to meet radioactive material tracking mandates, but Walker said the sky is the limit: “It can apply to anything.”