UnifiedPOS or UPOS is a world wide vendor- and retailer-driven Open Standard's initiative under the National Retail Federation, Association of Retail Technology Standards (NRF-ARTS) to provide vendor-neutral software application interfaces (APIs) for numerous (as of 2011, thirty-six) point of sale (POS) peripherals (POS printer, cash drawer, magnetic stripe reader, bar code scanner, line displays, etc.).
The goal is to allow retailers freedom of choice in the selection of POS peripheral devices by the creation, utilization, and promotion of standardized connectivity.
Developed by a team of joint retailer and industry technical experts following published policies and procedures,[2] UnifiedPOS provides a consistent and exact framework for programming point of sale devices that is platform-independent and vendor-neutral.
In addition, an increasing focus on using XML language commands to control the POS devices can be seen in the XML-POS Appendix in UnifiedPOS Version 1.13 standard.
The principal responsibilities of this committee are to ensure that the standards it manages continues to expand in accordance with retailer requirements.
In 2011 effort is underway to create an updated UnifiedPOS 2.0 standard [5] which will add many enhanced features and functions to support newer programming paradigms and remote XML POS peripheral installation scenarios.