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New ARTS Standards to Speed Adoption of Cutting-Edge Retail Technologies

As retail technologies evolve at a breakneck pace, the Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) has chosen Oracle to spearhead the creation of new standards for retail-specific service-oriented architecture (SOA)-a key innovation that will dramatically speed implementation and optimization of retail business technologies.

In addition, Oracle is helping define two other key ARTS standards, one for sales transaction systems and the other for managing warehouse data.

Founded in 1993 by the National Retail Federation, ARTS has created standards that are now fundamental to the way retailers do business, including the ARTS Data Model, Standard RFPs, and UnifiedPOS.

With Oracle's participation, ARTS recently developed and launched IXRetail Notification Event Architecture for Retail (NEAR), a schema that helps retailers connect applications in a stateless, decoupled way.

SOA Blueprint for Retail
Together with Oracle customer Big Lots, Oracle has been chosen to lead the committee that is defining an industry-standard blueprint to help retailers adopt SOA as quickly and profitably as possible by leveraging ARTS XML standards.

SOA takes everyday business applications and breaks them into individual business tasks, called services. These services can then be shared within the enterprise, integrated with trading partners, or exposed to customers to create new or modified business processes. The result: retail technologies can rapidly adapt to changing market conditions.

The committee is finding answers to key questions: What is the ideal SOA for retail? What infrastructure is required? What are the logical services required, and what is the right granularity of services? How should ARTS XML documents be passed?

"Retailers have been slow to adopt SOA, despite the tremendous benefits it can bring to their businesses," says Richard Mader, executive director of ARTS. "The SOA Blueprint project is an important step toward breaking down barriers to adoption and providing retailers with the education and guidance they need in order to get started."

Retail Transaction Interface
New technologies such as kiosks, self-checkout, and checkout via mobile device are multiplying the ways customers can pay for goods and services.

Oracle has joined the ARTS Retail Transaction Interface committee, whose goal is to define a POS interface that enables retailers to integrate alternative customer interaction points as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Standardizing on a common application programming interface API will eliminate the need to dictate the internals of the POS system itself.

Data Warehouse Model
Oracle has based its store systems on the revolutionary ARTS Data Model, a proven solution enabling retailers to select best-of-breed applications, speed implementation, and drastically reduce interface costs.

Now Oracle is working with ARTS to develop a similar model for warehouse data. The model will complement the ARTS Data Model, the ARTS XML Schema, and the ARTS Data Dictionary. At the same time, it will avoid creating and redefining entities, attributes, and XML elements already published in the ARTS standards work products.

For more information about ARTS standards, please e-mail the editors.

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