Reteaua GEPIR
GEPIR is an international register created by EAN International. It is operated by the national EAN organizations (MO-Member Organizations) where the users (companies or persons) can ask information about companies (now) and their products( in a next stage) implied in the local or the international distribution chains. An order to the register can be done in an electronic format (computer to computer) or by a client computer with an interface for the human user.The GEPIR Register has three levels:
- GCP servers from GEPIR network ( GCP- Global Company Prefix, an unique identifier for the GS1 member company). They are national servers, operated by the GS1 Organizations or on behalf .They contain the basic information about every GS1 member company and also the pointers to the data on locations, products, containers, images, SSCC-s,
- GEPIR trunk – the network that links together the national servers
- the Web services – applications which allow the existing resources to the users ; the resources offered by GS1 organisations ( charged with the design services’ security) come from their members ( charged with the data quality) .
The GS1 Organizations’ role is also to encourage and promote the connecting of other information service providers to the register. These users,can provide informations on products and companies from their databases or traceability information as change for the GEPIR resources .
GEPIR stores only the data for the identification of the user company and for the information flow routing. The GCP servers, forming the Distributed Register, have the user companies’ physical and electronic addresses (URL). GEPIR uses its own register to route the requests to the local application servers (Web services of MO or ASP) using the electronic addresses stored the national GCP servers. This application are MO certified and they are able to answer to all the standard requests established by GEPIR network.
In fact, the benefit of the users come from the existence of a single, unique, entrance point in the network where a certain information is requested, then the host server of that information is found and the answer is send back through the same unique point where the user had accessed the network.
GS1 Romania is a member of GEPIR Distributed Register with its own database, CEROM, where there are stored data about the companies, their products, hierarchy offering to its members global access facilities through a special link from their own Web page. It supervises all the global GEPIR developments for implementing them and it develops its own resources and offers them to GEPIR. Now, the GEPIR system unifies the main data resources of 60 national EAN organizations.