Objective

An EPC identifier may be expressed in a number of representations or encodings, such as BINARY, tag-encoding URI, pure-identity URI, legacy formats

The objective of the Tag Data Translation (TDT) is to provide flexible translation (encoding/decoding) between these different representations of an EPC. For example, TDT allows a binary string to be converted into a URI representation or vice versa. The coding schemes specified in EPCglobal Tag Data Standards v1.27 are supported in v1.0 of Tag Data Translation.

Status

There is an implementation available for download .

Organization

The TDT project consists of two modules:

• the TDTEngine (library for performing conversion)
• TDTFrontEnd (a test client that uses TDTEngine to perform conversions)

  TDTEngine makes use of the XML schema and instance files defined in EPCglobal Tag Data Translation v1.0

Usage Scenarios

Possible usage scenarios include the following:

• Convert a binary EPC string read from a tag into a tag-encoding URI for use with ALE

• Convert a binary EPC string read from a tag into a pure-identity URI for use with EPCIS

• Convert a binary EPC string into a legacy format (e.g. GTIN + serial number) for use with legacy applications

• Convert an EPC into a hostname, to be looked up in order to perform an ONS query. (N.B. ONS currently only supports SGTIN)

• Convert an EPC into a binary format, for writing an EPC onto a tag