AUTOMATIC DATA COLLECTION DEVICE THAT INTELLIGENTLY SWITCHES DATA BASED ON DATA TYPE

摘要

A method and system for intelligently routing data received from an automatic data collection (“ADC”) device in an ADC device platform based on its type. A data routing mechanism operates on the data-receiving side of an ADC data server. After identifying the characteristics of the input data, the data routing mechanism determines the destination for the data based on the characteristics, then routes the data to the selected destination. For some types of data, the selected destination may be an intermediate destination where the data undergoes additional processing before being transmitted to another location, while for other types of data the selected destination may be the application that ultimately processes the data. For example, the data routing mechanism may receive a set of input data, analyze the data to determine that the data is voice data, and then route the data to a speech recognition module that processes voice data. ADC devices accommodated by the system include bar code readers, speech recognition systems, RF tag readers, resonator readers, and two-dimensional symbol readers optical character recognition (“OCR”) systems. The invention finds application within a network of ADC device platforms that receive requests for input data from both local and remote applications. Data may be communicated to remote users using any data protocol, including the Transmission Control Protocol (“TCP”), the User Datagram/Internet Protocol (“UDP/IP”) or the User Datagram Plus Protocol (“UDP+”).