19-04-06 10:34
Age: 2 yrs

BY: BROCK, DAVID L.

The Electronic Product Code™ (EPC™) was conceived as a means to identify physical objects. These include not only retail products, but also containers, packages and shipments, as well as more general physical systems, assemblies and components. The EPC™ is a short, simple and extensible code designed primarily for efficient referencing to networked information. There are a variety of current and legacy identification coding systems that perform a similar function, such as the Uniform Product Code (U.P.C.) and its numbering superset, the Global Trade Item Number (GTIN) and the Vehicle Identification Number (VIN). Since the EPC™ is a general means of identifying objects and referencing networked information, we propose to use the EPC™ to reference other identification codes in other numbering systems. In other words, we propose to use the EPC™ as a sort of ‘meta-code’ to uniquely identify objects and correlate disparate coding systems.

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