Point-of-Service Architecture
CategoryRetail Standards
Unified Point-of-Service (UPOS) is an architecture standard maintained by the Object Management Group (OMG) that defines common application interfaces and certification mechanism for POS systems and connecting peripheral devices used in the retail environment.
Retail System Guidelines
POS Application Interfaces and Platform Mappings
UPOS standard helps ensure that devices designed according to the specification can be changed or added to the mix at the Point-of-Sale (POS) with a minimum of programming work to make them function properly, regardless of the operating system.
The UnifiedPOS Standard Committee created UPOS as a vendor-neutral and platform-independent peripheral architecture abstraction over specific platform implementations, such as JavaPOS, OLE for Retail POS (OPOS) and POS for .NET. Such unification created an environment that allowed to avoid competition between alternative standards while encouraging competition among specific implementations.
UPOS defines a multi-layered architecture in which a POS Application interacts with the Physical or Logical Device from a particular Device Category through the Control layer. The latter uses an Interface to call Services — components that implement specific functions of the Physical Device, or trigger standard events delivered to the Application, which, in turn, manipulates the Physical Device by calling platform specific APIs.
