Retail

ARTS: Standards for retail market

Who is developing products must pay attention to standards. Standards are essential to ensure interoperability among different vendors.

Organizations like Oasis and W3C have developed many generic standards. These standards are applicable to different markets.

The Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) of the National Retail Federation is a retailer-driven membership organization dedicated to creating an open environment where both retailers and technology vendors work together to create international retail technology standards.

ARTS developed standards for Data Model, Point of Sale (POS), Reuqests for Proposal (RFP) and XML.

ARTS XML committee has developed 15 XML schemas like Customer, Price and Inventory. Furthermore, ARTS released an XML Best Practices document.

ARTS announced at January, 2008, the release of the SOA Blueprint for Retail and associated SOA Best Practices technical reports.

“The Blueprint describes the infrastructure components, tools, models for business services and how ARTS standards can ensure success in companies’ SOA implementation. While SOA is a generic infrastructure strategy that can be implemented by any industry, the differentiator is in the business services (functions). The ARTS Blueprint is specific to retail, defining many SOA services by the retail functions Buy, Sell, Logistics and Administer.”

Retail technology vendors must follow closely the standard development at ARTS.