EPCglobal

Standards & Protocols

Organization under GS1 responsible for developing and managing EPC standards including Gen2, EPCIS, and Tag Data Standard.

EPCglobal

EPC standards organization under GS1." data-category="Standards & Protocols">EPCglobal is the subsidiary of GS1 responsible for developing and managing the Electronic Product Code (EPC) standards suite. Founded in 2003 as a joint venture between GS1 (formerly EAN International and the Uniform Code Council), EPCglobal brought together retailers, manufacturers, and technology companies to create an open, interoperable framework for RFID-enabled supply chain visibility.

Standards Portfolio

EPCglobal maintains several interconnected standards:

Standard Purpose Current Version
EPC Gen2 / Tag Protocol Air interface for UHF RFID Gen2v2 (2015)
Tag Data Standard (TDS) How GS1 keys encode to EPC binary TDS 2.1
Tag Data Translation Format conversion (binary/URI/human) TDT 1.6
EPCIS Supply chain event sharing EPCIS 2.0
Core Business Vocabulary Standard event vocabularies CBV 2.0
LLRP Reader control protocol LLRP 1.1
ALE Application-level event filtering ALE 1.1
Discovery Service Cross-partner EPC data lookup Draft
ONS EPC-to-URL resolution ONS 2.0

Architecture Vision

EPCglobal designed a layered architecture where data flows from physical tag reads to global visibility:

  1. Tag IC stores the EPC binary (on-tag)
  2. Reader captures EPC via Gen2 protocol
  3. Middleware / ALE filters and aggregates events
  4. EPCIS repository stores structured events (what/where/when/why)
  5. ONS and Discovery Service enable cross-partner data sharing

Industry Adoption

EPCglobal standards power the world's largest RFID deployments. Major retailers (Walmart, Zara/Inditex, Nike, Decathlon) and logistics companies (DHL, FedEx) build their RFID infrastructure on the EPC framework. The RAIN RFID alliance acts as the technology-marketing arm promoting adoption.

See also: GS1 | EPCIS | EPC Gen2

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Preguntas frecuentes

The RFID glossary is a comprehensive reference of technical terms, acronyms, and concepts used in Radio-Frequency Identification technology. It is designed for engineers, system integrators, and project managers who work with RFID and need clear definitions of terms like EPC, backscatter, anti-collision, and ISO 18000.

Yes. RFIDFYI provides glossary definitions in 15 languages including English, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, Arabic, French, Russian, German, Turkish, Vietnamese, Indonesian, and Thai.