Retail Data Model Releases with Modest Location Technology Support

The Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS), the standards division of the National Retail Federation released version 6.0 of their Retail Data Model, a project that was two years in development. According to an article in Fibre2Fashing, supporting a full range of computer applications to operate retail businesses across multiple retail segments such as convenience stores, big box retailers, gas stations, etc. But the support for location technology looks minimal as the article states that the improvements to the model include "Geo Coordinates: Expanded ability to support multiple geo-coordinate systems used to map coordinates to physical addresses (Geocoding)." I guess if it didn’t support geocoding before, the model had a hard time creating trade areas, doing target marketing, analyzing psychographics, and basic site selection. Earlier versions (See version 4.0 [PDF]) of the model give slight mention to census demographics. I guess we’ll have to wait for version 7.0.