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A Standards Update - Why do we need standards?
Welcome to this edition of a regular column about standards in
the Automatic Identification and Data Capture (AIDC) industry. This column will
be updated regularly to keep you current on news of standards and their impact
on the industry.
In the coming months, we will try to educate you on the various
technologies covered under the AIDC umbrella as well as bring news of the
standardization process and its progress. If you have news about standards that
you want to share, or questions you want to ask, send them to steve@hightechaid.com
and we will try to incorporate them into the next column.
In the last issue of this column, I tried to give an
introduction about standards and gave some examples in the RFID world. In this
issue, we will cover the need for standards.
The term standards covers a lot of ground. Everything we touch
in our life is in some way governed by standards, whether they are actual
standards, de-facto standards, or even just commonly agreed ideas. I mentioned
the standards for credit cards last issue, but consider other things more common
in our life. How about the size of paper? In the United States we use
"letter" size paper for all of our daily work (in most other countries
they use a metric size of paper, close to letter size called A4). Think about
the problems in paper production, storage, etc. if we all just arbitrarily used
a different paper size.
The global home for standards is ISO (International Standards
Organization - http://www.iso.ch)
where they have literally thousands of standards in about 40 broad categories
from terminology to testing, to health care, to railway engineering, to
clothing, to agriculture, to paper, and most important to us, to information
technology.
ISO joined with IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission -
http://www.iec.ch)
to form a Joint Technical Committee (JTC 1) with responsibility for the
Information Technology side of standards. As many of you may be aware, it is
with JTC 1 (http://www.jtc1.org)
that the global standardization of the AIDC technologies rest.
In January 1995, AIM met with the U.S. TAG to JTC 1 who agreed
to propose the formation of a new SubCommittee at the JTC1 meeting in June 1995.
At that meeting an Ad-Hoc group was formed to review comments, prepare
recommendations, and a draft title and scope. The Ad-Hoc met in November 1995
and they recommended the formation of the new SubCommittee to JTC 1. The
subcommittee (SC 31) was formed with the first meeting in Brussels in 1996. At
that time, three work groups were setup within the SubCommittee and since then
another has been added. The workgroups defined are as follows:
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WG 1 Data Carriers: This includes all the symbology standards in
the barcode world, as well as any future standardization in the data carrier
area.
-
WG 2 Data Syntax: The definitions of how messages are stored and
created.
-
WG 3 Conformance: The testing of hardware along with the
specification of quality for the technologies.
-
WG 4 RFID: All aspects of RFID with three subgroups and a task
force as follows:
-
SG 1 Data Syntax
-
SG 2 Unique Id. for RFID tags
-
SG 3 Air Interface
-
TF 1 Application Profiles
Work is well under way in all these groups, with the first
global standards likely to be published in 1999. Participation in these groups
is only possible as a representative of your National Body (ANSI in the USA, BSI
in UK etc.), though some organizations have applied for and been granted Liaison status with the
subcommittee and are able to participate directly in the work.
What does all this mean to you?
From a manufacturer and end user prospective, standards are very
important. International standards benefits everyone in many ways. These
include: elimination of duplication of effort in creation process, standards
compliance will be eased, (one instead of several), and the elimination of
duplicate but different standards (national or regional standards that are the
same but different).
Next month we will look at the work of SC 31 in a bit more
detail.
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