RFID Journal Staff asked 9 years ago Are they no longer into Electronic Product Code technology? Is there such a thing as a "test" EPCglobal network that one can test and try?
—Nagesh S.
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Nagesh,
VeriSign (now Symantec) originally was going to provide something called the Product Name Service (PNS), which would point people to information about products on the Web (see VeriSign to Run EPC Directory, VeriSign Initiates Two EPC Services and The EPC Network Gets Real). This concept is no longer part of the EPC framework, however, and VeriSign is no longer involved in RFID.
As for the so-called "EPCglobal network," there really is no such thing. The phrase was merely a marketing term that was sometimes used to refer to the suite of EPCglobal standards, or to the net effect of having many companies use EPCglobal standards to interact with each other.
If you want to get started using EPCglobal standards, there are a number of free resources available. If you want to understand how to encode and decode the Electronic Product Codes stored in RFID tags, check out Ken Traub's free interactive tools at kentraub.com/aidc.
If you would like to get started with the EPCglobal Low-Level Reader Protocol (LLRP), go to llrp.org. And if you're looking for free open-source implementations of EPCglobal's Application-Level Events (ALE) standard for RFID middleware, or the EPC Information Services (EPCIS) standard for sharing visibility data across supply chains, you can find them at fosstrak.org. Another good, free EPCIS resource is the Visibility Data Workbench.
—Mark Roberti, Founder and Editor, RFID Journal
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