WYTrax cattle tracking program runs on a Palm and uses a bluetooth enabled RFID reader to inventory the herd and return information about each cow.

Cowster is the nickname I've given to the idea of using Web services to build a distributed cattle tracking system. Now a Wyoming company has move us one step closer to reality by using Bluetooth, RFID, and PDAs to let ranchers keep track of vital information about each member of the heard and pull it up with the wave of a wand.

A article on News of the Weird explains it pretty well (warning scroll down to read the page). Cowster would take this one step further and create datastores with herd genealogies at private hosting services (perhaps associated with coops). A standard would allow a particular cows genealogy and heard associations to be traced through this centralized system. The goal is to keep the data private and under the control of its owners unless it needs to be queried to prevent the outbreak of some disease.