DZone

Everybody ‘knows’ GS1 because it’s the organization that standardizes the EAN/UPC barcodes that we find on pretty much every product that we buy in supermarkets and elsewhere. These codes allow quick scanning at check-out where the product identity then is used to look up pricing information.

GS1 Digital Link moves the EAN/UPC barcode into the world of APIs: It turns the EAN/UPC identifiers into URLs which can be compressed, printed as QR codes so that they can be scanned with mobile phone cameras (they can also be scanned when presented via NFC), and then can be used to retrieve product information through an HTTP API.

Source: DZone