Electronic Product Code Information Services (EPCIS) is a global
GS1 Standard for creating and sharing visibility event data, both within and across enterprises, to enable users to gain a shared view of physical or digital objects within a relevant business context.
[EPCIS 1.2, p. 9] "Objects" in the context of EPCIS typically refers to physical objects that are handled in physical steps of an overall business process involving one or more organizations. Examples of such physical objects include trade items (products), logistic units, returnable assets, fixed assets, physical documents, etc. “Objects” may also refer to digital objects which participate in comparable business process steps. Examples of such digital objects include digital trade items (music downloads, electronic books, etc.), digital documents (electronic coupons, etc.), and so forth.
The EPCIS standard was originally conceived as part of a broader effort to enhance collaboration between trading partners by sharing of detailed information about physical or digital objects. The name EPCIS reflects the origins of this effort in the development of the
Electronic Product Code (EPC). However, EPCIS does not require the use of Electronic Product Codes, nor of
Radio-frequency identification (RFID) data carriers, and as of EPCIS 1.1 does not even require instance-level identification (for which the Electronic Product Code was originally designed). The EPCIS standard applies to all situations in which visibility event data is to be captured and shared, and the presence of “EPC” within the name is of historical significance only.
EPCIS 1.0 was first ratified in April 2007.
[Roberti, Mark,]
The EPCIS Standard in Perspective
" RFID Journal, April 2007. At the time of ratification, over 30 companies had used the draft EPCIS standard to exchange data and collaborate with trading partners As of 2014, 24 commercial products had received certificates of compliance to the EPCIS standard from GS1.
[GS1]
EPCglobal Software Certification Program
retrieved 26 October 2014. EPCIS 1.1 was ratified by GS1 in May, 2014.
[Beth Bacheldor]
RFID News Roundup
RFID Journal, 29 May 2014. EPCIS 1.2 was ratified by GS1 (in conjunction with CBV 1.2) in September 2016. EPCIS 2.0 and CBV 2.0 were ratified by GS1 in June 2022.
The GS1 US Rx EPCIS Conformance Testing Program is administered by Drummond Group, LLC.
[https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/gs1-us-launches-gs1-us-rx-epcis-conformance-testing-program-300749184.html]
History
In 2001, the MIT Auto-ID Center published a paper proposing the
Physical markup language (PML), intended as "a common 'language' for describing physical objects, processes and environments". PML was one of four components of an "intelligent infrastructure" envisioned by the Auto-ID Center, the other three components being
RFID tags, the
Electronic Product Code, and the Object Naming Service. As the work of the MIT Auto-ID Center was taken up by
EPCglobal in 2004, the PML concept was renamed Electronic Product Code Information Services (EPCIS), and efforts began to create a global standard. In 2005, the first version of the EPCglobal Architecture Framework was published, which introduced EPCIS as a standard under development and showed how it related to other components of an envisioned architecture for RFID-based tracking of physical objects within supply chains.
EPCIS 1.0 was first ratified in April 2007.
A companion standard, the EPC Core Business Vocabulary 1.0, was ratified by
EPCglobal in October, 2010.
[EPCglobal,]
Core Business Vocabulary Standard
" EPCglobal Standard, October, 2010. Despite the RFID-oriented origins of EPCIS, it came to be used in applications that used bar codes exclusively or
bar codes in combination with RFID tags.
EPCIS 1.1 and CBV 1.1 were ratified in May 2014.
New features in EPCIS 1.1 include support for class-level identification (needed especially in bar code applications), a new event type to describe processes where inputs are transformed into outputs, and additional event data to describe business transfers and instance- or lot-level master data.
EPCIS 1.2 and CBV 1.2 were ratified in September 2016. New features include a mechanism to declare a previous event as being erroneous, and a mechanism for including master data into the EPCIS document header.
[EPCIS 1.2, p. 4]
GS1 EPCIS Rx Conformance tests are administered by their testing partner Drummond Group, LLC.
References
{{Reflist
External links
EPCIS and EPC Core Business Vocabulary standard pageat GS1
EPCIS standardcurrent version. GS1, (Latest version: Version 2.0, June 2022)
CBV standardcurrent version. GS1, (Latest version: Version 2.0, June 2022)
Normative artefacts for EPCIS & CBV standardsEPCIS and CBV Implementation GuidelineEPCIS SandboxEPCIS Workbench
(formerl
Visibility Data Workbench
, a free interactive tool for encoding and decoding EPCIS data and interacting with EPCIS repositories
GS1 standards