ARTS Standards Pavilion

SOA is a standards based strategy to configure IT assets, both current and future, as services.  This allows retailers to adapt rapidly to changing business needs by allowing different services to exchange information without having to undertake costly and time-consuming integration projects, and allows them to leverage existing assets.  Oracle and SAP will be showing how they have been modifying their offerings to run on an SOA platform. 

“It is critical that retailers have the best available information to plan and implement the right SOA strategy for their business,” said ARTS Executive Director Richard Mader. “At the Pavilion, attendees will be able to see first-hand how major retailers are using the technology standards that ARTS has developed over the last fifteen years to build their SOA.”   

The ARTS Standards Pavilion, booth 2155 on the Annual Convention exhibit floor, will give attendees an opportunity to learn how to create an efficient SOA using ARTS and other standards. Booth sponsors such as Oracle, IBM, Accessvia, Channel Intelligence, Epson, Escalate Retail, Mettler Toledo, Merchant Advantage, Microsoft, PCMS, Retail Anywhere, SAP and Soft Solutions, will be present in the Pavilion to explain how they are capitalizing on their use of ARTS standards and how the standards can help other businesses thrive.  

In the Data Model area of the Pavilion, ARTS Data Model-conformant vendor Retail Anywhere will demonstrate the importance of the Model as a flexible repository of precise data definitions. Additionally, Soft Solutions will demonstrate their Master Data Management (MDM) solution and how utilizing a Data Model enables retailers to successfully implement their merchandise and marketing management solutions.  

UnifiedPOS, the ARTS standard for connecting peripheral devices to POS terminals with minimal programming changes, is currently being transformed to operate in an SOA environment using web services. Microsoft and IBM will provide a look at how this will work by demonstrating the conceptual versions of Web Services for POS (WS-POS). While WS-POS is in development, UnifiedPOS continues as the standard for device connectivity. Epson will demonstrate the latest version 1.11 in the Pavilion as well.  

This year, the Pavilion will feature two new standard schemas to support e-commerce. The first, the Comparison Shopping Engines (CSE) schema developed in partnership with NRF division Shop.org, defines standard data formats so retailers can more easily submit detailed product information to CSEs and CSEs can respond with standard acknowledgements, error messages and click information. The first working demonstrations of this schema will be debuted by Channel Intelligence and Merchant Advantage, showing two different models of how retailers can take advantage of this new schema. The second schema, the Product Content Management (PCM) schema being demonstrated by Accessvia, enables communication and management of images, videos and any content meant for multiple uses from a single copy. All 13 publicly available ARTS XML schemas, as demonstrated by Escalate Retail, IBM, Mettler Toledo and PCMS, function in an SOA environment.

The Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) is an international membership organization dedicated to reducing the costs of technology through standards. Since 1993, ARTS has been delivering application standards exclusively to the retail industry. ARTS has three standards: The Standard Relational Data Model, UnifiedPOS and IXRetail. Membership is open to all members of the international technology community- retailers from all industry segments, application developers and hardware companies. http://www.nrf-arts.org/.

The National Retail Federation is the world's largest retail trade association, with membership that comprises all retail formats and channels of distribution including department, specialty, discount, catalog, Internet, independent stores, chain restaurants, drug stores and grocery stores as well as the industry's key trading partners of retail goods and services. NRF represents an industry with more than 1.6 million U.S. retail establishments, more than 24 million employees - about one in five American workers - and 2005 sales of $4.4 trillion. As the industry umbrella group, NRF also represents more than 100 state, national and international retail associations. http://www.nrf.com/.

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