Achieving Semantic Interoperability for Digital Product Passports

Digital Product Passports (DPP) have emerged as pivotal tools to enable transparency and traceability across supply-chains and product lifecycles and thus enable a simultaneous transition towards a more digital, sustainable and circular economy. To this end, various DPP initiatives have emerged in recent years in different sectors, jurisdictions and application domains. While certain DPPs will become mandatory, such as the DPP mandated by the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) in the European Union, many other DPPs are currently being adopted voluntarily. While each of these DPP initiatives differs in detail, all DPPs are created with the aim of facilitating product-related information exchange with e.g., supply-chain partners, circular economy value networks, public administrations and/or with consumers. For this reason, the capability to exploit data from any DPP is key to the success of the DPP concept. Semantic interoperability is the ability to share and reuse data in a manner that is independent of a specific information system. Because of the heterogeneity of information systems world-wide, ensuring semantic interoperability both within a DPP system and between DPP systems becomes crucial. Without it, each DPP initiative risks becoming an isolated data silo, thus minimizing the benefits of the DPP concept. This paper first describes the value semantic interoperability delivers in the context of DPPs, and then discusses the possibilities for its achievement.