EPCglobal

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EPCglobal is a joint venture between GS1 (formerly known as EAN International) and GS1 US™ (formerly the Uniform Code Council, Inc.). It is an organization set up to achieve world-wide adoption and standardization of Electronic Product Code (EPC) technology in an ethical and responsible way.

The main focus of the group currently is to create both a world-wide standard for RFID and the use of the Internet to share data via the EPCglobal Network.

EPCglobal's board of governors includes representatives from GS1, GS1 US, The Gillette Company, Procter & Gamble, Wal-Mart, Hewlett-Packard, Johnson & Johnson, Dow Chemical, Checkpoint Systems and Auto-ID Labs and others.

1 History
2 EPCIS
3 Reader Protocol
4 External links

[edit] History

EPCglobal was formed in October, 2003 as the successor organization to the MIT Auto-ID Center, the original creator of the EPC technology. EPCglobal manages the EPC network and standards, while its sister organization, Auto-ID Labs, manages and funds research on the EPC technology.

[edit] EPCIS

EPC Information Services (EPCIS) is a repository of RFID Events based on standards from EPCglobal. The EPCIS is an event repository for reads from radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and readers. The EPCIS Specification is created in the EPCIS Working Group of the Software Action Group of EPCglobal. The use cases which drove the development of the specification came from the Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) Business Action Group, Healthcare and Life Sciences Business Action Group, and the Travel and Transportation Business Action Group of EPCglobal end user companies.

[edit] Reader Protocol

Reader Protocol (RP) is an interface standard specifying the interactions between a device capable of reading/writing tags and application software. The informal summary of the charter was "Define an interface supporting Reading, Writing and Killing tags, and the supporting operations necessary for those actions." The goal was to define an open and extensible interface that reader vendors could embrace supporting most operations in a standard (common) way, yet not dictate implementation nor preclude vendor extension and innovation.

Version 1.1 was ratified and made publicly available in August, 2006. Notable features include commands to read, write and kill tags, access to 'User Memory' as well as identity information, extensive configuration-related commands, rich reporting options, asynchronous notifications, multiple Message Transport Bindings (MTBs) including serial, TCP and HTTP transports and XML and Text message formats, ReadPoints and Sources (originally dubbed 'Virtual Reader') and rich extensibility mechanisms.

There is no version 1.0. A very early draft of the work-in-progress specification was released on the internet with the moniker "1.0", but the document was a very early file (mostly template) that didn't include most of the design points even at that time, let alone later additions and refinements. The document itself is clearly a very early and incomplete document, as obvious to even a casual review. The workgroup opted to change the version number to 1.1 to avoid confusion with this document, and to reflect the significant advances since the earlier work.