Posts Tagged ‘Tag Data Standard’

GS1 EPCglobal ratified and published the most recent version of the Tag Data Standard (TDS), 1.5.  I have always been a fan of TDS, but earlier versions served as much to expose embarassing disconnects in GS1 standards as they did to explain how to apply GS1 identifiers in an Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) context.  Earlier versions of TDS tightly bound the concept of the Electronic Product Code (EPC) to RFID, and that’s just wrong.  “EPC”, even as defined in those earlier versions of TDS, is a way of uniquely identifying objects on a global basis.  It’s purely a globally unique identifier standard.  That’s a hugely important and relatively new concept.  RFID–a simple data carrier technology that’s been around for many years–is almost insignificant in comparison.

Even the name “Tag Data Standard” reflects this wrong-headed binding of EPC to RFID by seeming to place the RFID “Tag” at the center of the “standard”.  Yes, there is a need for a “Tag Data Standard”, to show how to encode an EPC into an RFID tag, but it is wrong to Read the rest of this entry »