Ontology Requirements for Digital Product Passports based on the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation

Enabling digital and machine-readable records for products aggregating information about their entire lifecycle is the underlying idea of digital product passports (DPP). June 2024 marked an important milestone for DPPs as the European Parliament and the Council adopted the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), outlining also the requirements for DPPs and the sustainability-related product parameters that these may need to include. In the long term, DPPs may be applicable to nearly all physical goods placed on the EU market or put into service. Establishing a DPP ecosystem will be a complex task with many intricate system parts to be integrated. One of the challenges for DPP ecosystems is how to capture and reflect the knowledge and information about products in an unambiguous way, and enable semantic interoperability with already existing and to-be built DPP systems. A feasible approach is to use ontologies. In this article, we establish requirements for the development of an upper-level ESPR-compliant core ontology, and analyse the key notions for such a core ontology solely relying on the ESPR. These requirements serve as a basis for the design and development of an ESPR-compliant DPP core ontology but could be extended beyond the ESPR and DPP scope.