Bridging the Gaps Towards a Unified Architecture for Digital Product Passports: A Data Space Perspective on Existing Standards and Initiatives

The Digital Product Passport (DPP) plays a key role for the circular economy, aiming to provide standardized, interoperable and trustworthy product information across the entire lifecycle. However, DPP implementations differ significantly across sectors, actors and product types, and thus require context-sensitive technical architectures. In this paper, we present a structured approach to align general architectural standards for DPP systems. We investigate data spaces as an enabling infrastructure for DPPs, highlighting their role in secure, sovereign, and semantically interoperable data exchange, where participants maintain full data control. The paper details core data space components like connectors, identity and trust mechanisms, federated catalogs, and policy-based contracts. Furthermore, we analyze how linked data approaches can establish semantic foundations and data element requirements for DPPs, while GS1 standards provide global product identifiers. Ultimately, this paper proposes an example for a layered architectural blueprint that integrates data spaces (for governance and infrastructure), AAS (as a digital twin framework for structuring product data), semantic models from initiatives such as CIRPASS (for shared vocabularies and ontologies), and GS1 (for global identification and event semantics). This combined approach aims to create a truly interoperable and scalable DPP ecosystem, addressing current complexities and leveraging existing technological components.