An announcement is due from shop.org and ARTS (Association of Retail Technology Standards) next Tuesday on Data Feed Standards in the ecommerce sector. Mirroring Sir Tim Berners Lee's efforts to structure the world's data with the semantic web project, Alan Rimm-Kaufman is pushing through a common standard for ecommerce merchants to publish their product listings. The standard includes reporting click and transaction information from price comparison engines back to merchants.

The announcement comes just in time, as Google hurtles forward in the development of its competing GData standard for Google Base and Google Checkout. Google Base is to power comparison shopping on Google's main search, with Google Checkout providing clients and merchants with bank clearing of transactions.

[Google Data API have opened a blog here]

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