As described in the Project Overview there is no central repository of data. Each node holds its own data and makes that data available as and when it sees fit. However, you may wish to expose some of this data for consumption outside your group. You may wish for example to let the end user see a listing of events with dates and times so that they can track the progress of their order. Another case may be where you are using only the Mobile Edition and data needs to be stored externally for access by trading partners.

In the first case, you may wish, as a group or individual peer, to allow external entities to access certain parts of the data. You may not wish to provide these services yourself for security or other reasons, or you may wish to allow users of the new EPC Global Network run by Verisign to locate, read or update your data. For this we provide a repository with links to the external networks. You can also use this service to access data stored by others in either our repository or on the EPC Global network where the owners of the data have provided you with the proper credentials.

This service greatly expands the use of the system and allows for seamless and very low cost access to the new systems being employed by the large retailers and manufactures. You need only configure your node to use this service and either have EAN.UCC membership to obtain your codes, or use our EAN.UCC Membership Service(details below) which will provide you with the codes as needed.

This service also allows non Pharm2Phork users to read or update data via SMS, Email or a web service or HTTP client. This is offered for the likes of occasional members of the supply chain where it is beneficial to enter small amounts of information on an infrequent basis. An example is a transaction 1234 is collected by transport company Acme. The driver would merely send an SMS message to the service with the transaction number and his identifier and possibly other non structured text. This data would then be added to the message base and would then be available in the event of a full trace being required.