A pan-European consortium of companies, universities and user groups has been created to develop an open architecture for the development, deployment and use of Near Field Communication (NFC) enabled applications in mobile handsets.
Co-funded by the European Commission and the Information Society Technologies (IST) programme, the Store Logistics and Payment with NFC (StoLPaN) project aims to define open commercial and technical frameworks for NFC enabled services on mobile devices.
In order to accurately address the interoperability issues currently affecting the technology, various usage cases are to be defined within the StoLPaN framework and tested throughout Europe. These usage cases will contribute to the identification of a common set of business rules, which will define the roles and responsibilities of every player in the NFC ecosystem.
The results will then be submitted for approval to the relevant industry bodies for standardization of payments, mobile, transit and ticketing.
Based on these findings, the consortium will look into the specifications for technical requirements and the security aspects of NFC enabled applications. They will also explore the connection to existing contactless platforms, easing the burden on individual providers.
At the same time the project team will demonstrate how the business rules and technical requirements can be implemented in existing contactless infrastructures. Also, a NFC host application will be developed to support a range of services.
The StoLPaN project team expects to issue its first version of the business rules and technical requirements by the summer of 2007. These will be accompanied by the first version of the host application, with the StoLPaN project scheduled for completion by 2009.