The Pharm2Phork TDT Engine is an easy way to convert between different EPC data tag representations. An EPC identifier may be expressed in a number of representations or encodings, such as BINARY, tag-encoding URI, pure-identity URI, legacy formats.

The Pharm2Phork Tag Data Translation (TDT) Engine provides flexible translation (encoding/decoding) between these different representations of an EPC. For example, our TDT Engine allows a binary string to be converted into a URI representation or vice versa.

The Pharm2Phork TDT Engine is based on the Fosstrak TDT Engine and makes use of OWL2 ontologies in defing the XML schema and instance files defined in EPCglobal Tag Data Translation v1.0.

Possible usage scenarios include the following:

• Convert a binary EPC string read from a tag into a tag-encoding URI for use with ALE
• Convert a binary EPC string read from a tag into a pure-identity URI for use with EPCIS
• Convert a binary EPC string into a legacy format (e.g. GTIN + serial number) for use with legacy applications
• Convert an EPC into a hostname, to be looked up in order to perform an ONS query. (N.B. ONS currently only supports SGTIN)
• Convert an EPC into a binary format, for writing an EPC onto a tag