Specification
Please note that this content is under development and is not ready for implementation. This status message will be updated as content development progresses.
The specification is the heart of UNTP. It defines the detailed specifications for interoperable implementations. This page provides an outline of the purpose and scope of each component of the specification.
Architecture
The architecture is the blueprint for all the components of the specification and how they work together. It defines the design principles which underpin the UNTP and shows the components working together from the perspective of a single actor and across the entire value-chain. The UNTP is a fundamentally decentralised architecture with no central store of data.
Digital Product Passport
The digital product passport (DPP) is issued by the shipper of goods and is the carrier of product and sustainability information for every serialised product item (or product batch) that is shipped between actors in the value chain. It is deliberately simple and lightweight and is designed to carry the minimum necessary data at the granularity needed by the receiver of goods - such as the scope 3 emissions in a product shipment. The passport contains links to conformity credentials which add trust to the ESG claims in the passport. The passport also contains links to traceability events which provide the "glue" to follow the linked-data trail (subject to confidentiality constraints) from finished product back to raw materials. The UNTP DPP does not conflict with national regulations such as the EU DPP. In fact, it can usefully be conceptualised as the upstream B2B feedstock that provides the data and evidence needed for the issuing of high quality national level product passports.
Conformity Credential
Conformity credentials are usually issued by independent third parties and provide a trusted assessment of product ESG performance against credible standards or regulations. As such the credential provides trusted verification of the ESG claims in the passport. Since the passport may make several independent claims (eg emissions intensity, deforestation free, fair work, etc) there may be many linked conformity credentials referenced by one passport. As an additional trust layer, the conformity credential may reference an accreditation credential that attests to the authority of the third party to perform the specific ESG assessments. The conformity credential data model has been developed by a separate UN/CEFACT project on digital conformity that has expert membership from accreditation authorities and conformity assessment bodies.
Traceability Events
Traceability events are very lightweights collections of identifiers that specify the “what, when, where, why and how” of the products and facilities that constitute a value chain. The UNTP is based on the GS1 EPCIS standard for this purpose because it is an existing and proven mechanism for supply chain traceability. Note that UNTP supports but does not require the use of GS1 identifiers. The basic idea behind the traceability event structure is that any supply chain of any complexity can always be accurately modelled using a combination of four basic event types. An object event describes an action on specific product(s) such as an inspection. A transaction event describes the exchange of product(s) between two actors such as sale of goods between seller and buyer. An aggregation event describes that consolidation or de-consolidation of products such as stacking bales of cotton on a pallet for transportation. Finally, a transformation event describes a manufacturing process that consumes input product(s) to create new output product(s). The UNTP uses these events in a decentralised architecture as the means to traverse the linked-data "graph" that represents the entire value-chain.
Identifiers
Identifiers of businesses (eg tax registration numbers), of locations (eg google pins, cadastral/lot numbers, GS1 GLNs), and of products (eg GS1 GTINs or other schemes) are ubiquitous throughout supply chains and underpin the integrity of the system. UNTP builds upon existing identifier schemes without precluding the use of new schemes so that existing investments and high integrity registers can be leveraged. UNTP requires four key features of the identifiers and, for those that don't already embody these features, provides a framework to uplift the identifier scheme to meet UNTP requirements. Identifiers used in UNTP implementations should be discoverable (ie easily read by scanning a barcode, QR code, or RFID), globally unique (ie by adding a domain prefix to local schemes), resolvable (ie given an identifier, there is a standard way to find more data about the identified thing), and verifiable (ie ownership of the identifier can be verified so that actors cannot make claims about identifiers they don't own).
Vocabularies
Web vocabularies are a means to bring consistent understanding of meaning to ESG claims and assessments throughout transparent value chains based on UNTP. There are hundreds of ESG standards and regulations around the world, each with dozens or hundreds of specific conformity criteria. Any given value chain from raw materials to finished product is likely to include dozens of passports and conformity credentials issued against any of thousands of ESG criteria. Without a consistent means to make sense of this data, UNTP would provide a means to discover a lot of data but no easy way to make sense of it. The UNTP defines a standard and extensible topic map (taxonomy) of ESG criteria and provides a mechanism for any standards authority, or national regulator, or industry association to map their specific terminology to the UNTP vocabulary.
Verifiable Credentials
The World-Wide-Web Consortium (W3C) has defined a standard called Verifiable Credentials (VCs). A VC is a portable digital version of everyday credentials like education certificates, permits, licenses, registrations, and so on. VCs are digitally signed by the issuing party and are tamper proof, privacy preserving, revokable, and digitally verifiable. The UN has previously assessed this standard and has recommended it's use for a variety of cross border trade use cases in a recent white paper. VCs are inherently decentralised and so are an excellent fit for UNTP which recommends that passports, credentials, and traceability events are all issued as W3C VCs. A related W3C standard called Decentralised Identifiers (DIDs) provides a mechanism to manage the cryptographic keys used by verifiable credentials and also to link multiple credentials into verifiable trust graphs. DIDs are not the same as the business / product / location identifiers maintained by authoritative agencies - but can be linked to them.
Data Carriers
Digital data needs to be linked to the physical product it describes and should be discoverable through the identifiers printed on that product serial or batch number. For high volume goods and easy / reliable discovery, these identifiers are already typically represented as barcodes, matrix codes, QR codes, or RFID encoded data. UNTP supports the use of these existing data carriers. A basic UNTP principle is that if you have a product then you should be able to find ESG data about that product even when the identifier is not a web link. Therefore, the UNTP defines a generalised protocol (based on GS1 Digital Link) to allow any identifier scheme (GS1 or otherwise) to be consistently resolvable so that product passports and other data can always be accessed from the identifier of the product. The UNTP also defines a specific QR based data carrier format for use on paper/PDF versions of conformity credentials or other trade documents that provides secure access to credentials in a way that is both human and machine readable. This provides a simple but powerful mechanism to facilitate uptake of digital solutions alongside existing paper/PDF based frameworks.