How about a GS1 standard for additional info?
GS1 is a global organization respsonsible for UPC/EAN codes for manufacturers. We have been talking to various member organizations and there seems to be a desire for a standard for manufacturers to insert data into mobile applications like ShopSavvy based on barcodes. Here is our idea:
It is our feeling that manufacturers might want to insert additional product information for use in mobile applications like our own ShopSavvy application. We believe a simple API could be agreed on by all GS1 associations making it easy for all manufacturers to insert additional product data into mobile applications that return specific information about a particular product.
A REST API that could take a query with a UPC/EAN and return an XML formatted response. ShopSavvy, and similar applications could make a simple HTTP request to the remote service and then parse the XML response on the device.
http://gr1.com/service/productquery.cgi?UPC=88222444448811
The XML feed could include:
<productinfo>
<partno>XX131</partno>
<title>Pink Widget</title>
<abstract/>The Pink Widget by ACME</abstract>
<text>This is some free form text. </text>
<url>http://www.acmecorp.com/</url>
<image> http://www.acmecorp.com/products/XX131/image.jpg</image>
<video>http://www.acmecorp.com/products/XX131/demo.mp4</video>
<audio>http://www.acmecorp.com/products/XX131/about.mp3</video>
<chat>http://jabber.acmecorp.com/products/XX131/chat</chat>
</productinfo>
In the case of the ShopSavvy application we would insert one or more of these NODES on our product information page. Here is an example of the page:
If you haven’t seen ShopSavvy in action this video might help:
We would love to help you implement this idea as a standard for your member companies. While it would be helpful to our application, we believe the entire industry would benefit from a standard XML format for manufacturer data relative to UPC information. Please let me know who I might work with to move this idea forward.
Regards,
Alexander Muse
1+214.550.2003 office
1+214.558.1079 cell
http://www.biggu.com
amuse@biggu.com
This idea sounds like a winner. It seems to me that there are more applications for this kind of a web service than just shopping – inventory control, etc.
I think it would be a lot more interesting to do something based on 2D barcodes, where the barcode could include name-value pairs of information, such that the interpretation of the name-value pairs be extensible and standardized. One of those standard name-value pairs could be the URL to a description document like you described above. I am have been designing a mobile application to do this in my spare time (down in Houston). I want to align it with RFID standards so that 2D barcodes can be used as a poor-mans RFID tag.
The main problem with UPC’s is that they aren’t unique enough. I heard in some stores in Japan you can scan products learn where they were grown and what day they arrived at the store. That isn’t possible wuth UPC’s since the UPC code doesn’t vary by lot.
There are lots of items with the same UPC that have important differences. For example, you might find two WRT54g routers with the same UPC but with different firmware versions. Or, you might find two gallons of milk with the same UPC but one expired last week and the other expires next week. That is what I meant by “not unique enough”.
You are right that there is no standard for 2D barcodes. But, there is a g1s standard that allows one to map a RFID tag to an internet domain name and/or to a set of URLs that describe the product identified by the RFID tag. There is nothing RFID-specific about the data encoding (AFAICT) so it would be very simple to create a 2D-barcode encoding while re-using the rest of the architecture.
[...] for Mobile Apps? Posted on March 4, 2009 by sterling1 On a blog called Big in Japan which you can see here, writer Alexander Muse (whose email address begins with amuse@ which I think is fairly… [...]
LOL – all UPCs are unique – officially. We can scan 2D barcodes, but there are no public sources of info. We are happy to provide info from 2D, but we need a source – get us a source and we will include info. Read up on UPC/EANs at the GS1 website.
Brian – late response, but all UPC are supposed to be unique for each product. For example, a silver iPod has a different UPC than a blue iPod. If some manufacturer is using the same UPC for multiple items – shame on them. Why would you think they would use different 2D barcodes for each product if they won’t for 1D? At the end of the day every unique item should have a unique 1D UPC barcode. This is the agreement a manufacturer must sign when using UPCs.
The concept with Milk (i.e. consumables with expiration dates) is something another Dallas company has been working on (i.e. within the 1D UPC framework). It is called POP Technology http://www.texasstartupblog.com/2008/06/02/startup-profile-pop-technology/ – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9JCmgzaSls