Glossary Of Rfid Terms -- O

Object Name Service

An Auto-ID Center-designed system for looking up unique Electronic Product Codes and pointing computers to information about the item associated with the code. ONS is similar to the Domain Name Service, which points computers to sites on the Internet.

OEM

See original equipment manufacturer

One-time programmable

Memory that can be written to, or programmed, only once and is afterwards write protected. After the memory is written to, it is like read-only memory.

One-time programmable tag

Also called a field-programmable tag. An RFID tag that can be written to once and read many times (see WORM).

ONS

See Object Name Service

Optical Character Recognition

A type of computer software designed to translate images of handwritten or typewritten text (usually captured by a scanner) into machine-editable text, or to translate pictures of characters into a standard encoding scheme (such as ASCII or Unicode). OCR began as a field of research in pattern recognition, artificial intelligence and machine vision.

Order Management System

A software system used in a number of industries for order entry and processing. Such industries include e-commerce, cataloging and financial securities.

Orientation

The position of a tag antenna vis-à-vis a reader antenna. With UHF systems, readers can be either circular-polarized or linear-polarized. When using a linear polarized antenna, the tag reader and antenna reader must be in alignment in order to achieve the longest reading distance. If that tag antenna is aligned vertically and the reader is sending out signals horizontally, only a small portion of the energy emitted by the reader will hit the tag antenna.

Original equipment manufacturer

A company that builds its own products from components bought from other manufacturers.