Thursday, April 19, 2007

EPCIS ratification boosts RFID industry

Giving a boost to the RFID industry, EPCIS (Electronic Product Code Information Services) ratification provided businesses a standard way to capture and share information collected by RFID chips. This is done by giving a standard set of interfaces for EPC data.

EPCIS provides a standard set of interfaces for EPC data. Chris Adcock, president of the standards organisation EPCglobal Inc., called the ratification as potentially having more impact than the 2004 release of the UHF Gen2 Passive RFID standard. Those are big words, since the Gen2 standard led to the development of considerably cheaper and better performing Gen2 RFID chips.

Five years after proponents began insisting that RFID would dramatically change the way companies track goods in the supply chain, RFID remains a niche technology partly held back by the complexities associated with exchanging information captured by RFID and turning it into knowledge that leads to such basic business goals as lower costs or higher revenues.

Vendors involved in the interoperability testing of EPCIS—and those likely to offer products that support the standard—include Auto-ID Labs, Avicon, BEA Systems, Bent Systems, IBM, Globe Ranger, IIJ, NEC, Oracle, Polaris Systems, Samsung and T3Ci.

Still, while EPCglobal and RFID vendors are working to create standards-based RFID technologies and processes, other challenges remain. RFID tags are still too costly in many instances, and RFID pioneers continue to struggle with what to do with all of the data they're collecting from the tags, and how to turn it into real business intelligence.

Source : EE Times-India

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