Patent 7482932 was granted and assigned to Hitachi on January, 2009 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
An individual article management system for managing an individual article distributed through a plurality of sites with a form thereof changed at least one of the plurality of sites. Each of the information processing apparatuses transmits read identification information and formed index data to a data center apparatus through a network, and the data center apparatus, receives the transmitted identification information and the transmitted index data, and stores each of the received index data into a storing apparatus so as to be associated with each other on the basis of the identification information for identifying the individual article.