Washington, DC, May 20, 2005--The Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) is making the inaugural international presentation of its acclaimed Standards Pavilion at Retail Solutions, June 7-9, 2005 at National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham, UK. The Standards Pavilion is a showcase for retail applications and IT products that incorporate ARTS standards, providing retailers increased flexibility at a lower cost. Featured in the Pavilion at Retail Solutions are:

Microsoft: Easily integrated POS components through ARTS UnifiedPOS and ARTS standard Digital Receipt XML schema within Microsoft Retail Management System.

PCMS: Optimum flexibility and ease of integration through applications based on ARTS data standards.

AccessVia: Accurate pricing in real time on customer-facing devices throughout the store by incorporating the standard ARTS IXRetail Price schema.

360Commerce: Efficiency and flexibility by completely incorporating the ARTS Standard Data Model, IXRetail Schemas and UnifiedPOS across all their applications. 

Torex Retail: Fully scaleable and internationally proven POS based on the ARTS Data Model. Lucas exploits the full power of Java and operates in Microsoft Windows or Linux. 

In the ARTS Pavilion stand L30 retailers will have a unique opportunity in a single exhibit area to see how easily and inexpensively existing applications can be integrated by choosing vendors who incorporate ARTS international standards. ARTS offers conformance testing to verify that vendors have accurately implemented these standards, as well as a series of standard Invitations to Tender (ITTs) to guide retailers in selecting the "right" application for their specific business needs. Visitors can review these ITT's in the Pavilion.

"Point of sale is the most vital system in retail," said Mike Hiscock, Director of Systems Development for House of Fraser and a founding member of the NRF-ARTS European Technology Council. "We are pleased that, thanks to standards such as the ARTS POSlog schema, we are able to integrate POS data with our enterprise more efficiently without jeopardizing accuracy or reliability. And the ARTS data model, which we recently implemented with XPoS from Unipower Solutions, allows us to easily store and generate POSlog data."

The exhibit can be viewed during show hours at NRF Stand #L30. Attendees are invited to stop by the booth to learn more about the standards initiative.

The Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) is an international membership organization dedicated to reducing the costs of technology through standards. Since 1993, ARTS has been delivering application standards exclusively to the retail industry. ARTS has three standards: The Standard Relational Data Model, UnifiedPOS and IXRetail. Membership is open to all members of the international technology community- retailers from all industry segments, application developers and hardware companies. For more information contact ARTS at ARTS@NRF.com or 202-626-8140. www.nrf-arts.org

The National Retail Federation is the world's largest retail trade association, with membership that comprises all retail formats and channels of distribution including department, specialty, discount, catalog, Internet and independent stores as well as the industry's key trading partners of retail goods and services. NRF represents an industry with more than 1.4 million U.S. retail establishments, more than 23 million employees - about one in five American workers - and 2004 sales of $4.1 trillion. As the industry umbrella group, NRF also represents more than 100 state, national and international retail associations. www.nrf.com.