GS1, ETSI, CEN Establish Global RFID Standards Forum

In mid February, GS1, ETSI and CEN commenced detailed planning of their work. In June of this year, most likely during the third week, the partners will hold a two-day workshop in Brussels for all interested parties to review a status report regarding ongoing standards-setting projects, and to begin sharing information. GRIFS will also offer further workshops: two in Asia, one in the United States and one in Europe. "The idea is not to develop the standards," Barthel says. "It's really about coming together and opening your workbook to show what you're doing."

GRIFS partners hope to see such cooperation extend beyond the duration of the EU project, and will work to get interested parties to sign a memorandum of understanding that expresses their intent to continue working together. They envision conducting approximately two meetings each year, as well as exchanging information electronically while alternately sharing the administration of the post-GRIFS project (which has not yet been named).

In creating GRIFS, GSI, ETSI and CEN responded to a call for proposals in May 2007 as part of the E.U.'s Seventh Framework Program for Information and Communication Technologies. The proposal to "support the networked enterprise" was funded with €500,000 ($736,000).

BRIDGE Publishes Standards Milestones
Separately, the BRIDGE project (Building Radio frequency Identification for the Global Environment), also funded by the European Union, has announced that two major milestones were met with the publication of two key papers. BRIDGE is currently working to set standards for looking up information about individual objects carrying an RFID tag with an Electronic Product Code (EPC).

The project members, which include GS1 member organizations, the Auto-ID Labs and several RFID solution providers and end users, have published the results on their public Web site. The papers—Requirements Document of Serial Level Lookup Service for Various Industries and High Level Design for Discovery Services—detail a design for a data model and interfaces for Discovery Services, also known as Serial-Level Look-Up Services.

The models cover both queries and the publishing of records for Discovery Services, and have already been submitted to various standards groups working in the area. They also define how users can request more detailed information about each EPC-tagged object. "This design will help us move from local-level pilots to global ones," says Barthel, who serves as the project coordinator for the BRIDGE program.