19-04-06 08:22
Age: 2 yrs

BY: HARRISON, MARK

The Electronic Product Code (EPC™) is the globally unique object ID in the Auto-ID infrastructure. It serves as a database lookup key in order to access information about a tagged object. An EPC™ Information Service (EPCIS) provides a standard interface for access and persistent storage of EPC-related data, for read and write access by authorized parties. The EPC™ will often be used as one of the parameters in a query sent to an EPCIS, although additional parameters such as a timestamp range or readerID or a particular well-defined attribute of the tagged object (e.g. date of manufacture) are also valid parameters. An EPCIS is not an omniscient entity which attempts to pull together and provide all available information about an EPC™ and return this as a comprehensive PML data packet. Rather, EPCIS is a interface, which handles very specific simple queries efficiently and just returns the relevant data required by that query. It is the responsibility of the client or application to make the required iterative queries to an EPCIS (or multiple EPCIS services across a supply chain) in order to deal with more complex queries. With this approach in mind, this paper examines the different fundamental categories of data which one might want to access via an EPCIS, then proposes three fundamental categories of simple query, which allow more complex queries to be broken down into tractable simple queries which an EPCIS could answer.

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