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ISO Blesses Gen2

Written by Evan Schuman
July 12th, 2006

The International Organization for Standards (ISO) on Wednesday officially embraced the UHF Gen2 efforts from EPCGlobal in what an EPC statement termed “a significant milestone.” (Dare I ask what a trivial milestone would be? Perhaps they should have said that it was a very unique significant milestone.)

The inclusion now means that Gen2-compliant RFID hardware will also be considered compliant by ISO standards. Officially, in lovely standards-group speak, ISO announced that EPC’s “UHF Generation 2 air interface protocol has been incorporated into the ISO/IEC 18000-6 Amendment 1 as Type C on UHF RFID.” No wonder English never became one of the romance languages.

Incorporation in the ISO standard comes just 18 months after it was ratified as a hardware standard by EPCglobal in December of 2004, EPC said.

In other RFID standards news, Wednesday also saw an announcement from Brussels of a 3-year R&D and training RFID exercise dubbed the BRIDGE (Building Radio frequency IDentification solutions for the Global Environment) project. Bridge is being supported by the European Union?s Sixth Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP6) with ?7.5 million funding. Bridge is being coordinated by the GS1 standards group and includes 31 global players.

?Since its inception, RFID has been hailed as the panacea for a more sophisticated and efficient global supply chain, but there are many questions to answer before this is realised,? said Henri Barthel, technical director at EPCglobal and BRIDGE project Co-ordinator. ?Cross-industry participation in such a large scale project is a key to its success. The BRIDGE project will transform RFID from being an identification technology into providing an EPCglobal based product information network.?

The BRIDGE project will focus on business-based research, provision of information services and hardware (sensors, tags) and software development, according to a Bridge statement.

Participants include: the Auto-ID Lab (Cambridge, UK), the Auto-ID Lab at Fudan University in Shangai, the Auto-ID Lab ETH Zurich/St Gallen, Switzerland; Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain; Technical University, Graz, Austria; British Telecom; SAP; AIDA Centre; CAEN; Confidex; CETECOM Spain; UPM Raflatac; VeriSign UK; Melior Solutions; Unisys; Domino Printing Sciences; JJ Associates; Carrefour; Nestl? UK; Benedicta; Kaufhof; Sony; El Corte Ingl?s; and Gardeur.

Posted in IT Strategy/Industry, RFID
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