Which terms does a Digital Product Passport carry? The question sounds like detail work, but it decides whether your data can still be read by anyone in ten years. Because the DPP does not invent a new language. It brings several existing ones together.
GS1, the W3C and the OpenEPCIS consortium each describe part of the product world, and on top of that there is a good dozen sector-specific EU vocabularies. The DPP has to speak them all at once. The real effort is not choosing a standard, but carrying hundreds of terms through dozens of product categories consistently.
Every standard names things differently
A shipping event is called cbv:BizStep-shipping in GS1. The rated capacity of a battery is called battery:ratedCapacity in the EU Batteries Regulation. A product name comes from schema.org, a supply-chain due-diligence declaration from the OpenEPCIS vocabulary. Four terms, four origins, one data set.
Anyone who invents their own field names here builds an island. The authority, the recycler and a third party’s verification tool, however, have to understand what is in your DPP without asking. That is exactly what the standards are for - and exactly why Transpareo sticks strictly to them instead of inventing its own schema.
The backbone: the event model of GS1 EPCIS 2.0
The lifecycle of a product is described via GS1 EPCIS 2.0 - the same standard that has mapped logistics supply chains for years. The standard knows five event types: the observation of an object (ObjectEvent), aggregation, transaction, transformation and association. Transpareo projects the lifecycle steps of a product as EPCIS ObjectEvents - the event type that records an observation on identified objects.
Every event carries a business step (shipping, recycling, repairing) and a disposition (active, recalled, recycled). From these building blocks a traceable log emerges: when a batch was shipped, when it was recalled, when it was recycled. Machine-readable and without room for interpretation.
The product data: the OpenEPCIS DPP Core
What a product is made of - material, recycled content, CO2 footprint, repairability - is described by the DPP Core vocabulary of OpenEPCIS. It defines classes such as MaterialComposition, RecycledContent, CarbonFootprintDeclaration or RepairabilityInfo.
Two conventions are worth mentioning because they avoid errors: share values are always decimal numbers between 0 and 1 (that is 0.85, not 85%). And every piece of information carries an access level - public, authorised or restricted - so that the same passport can deliver different views for end customers, partners and authorities.
A dedicated vocabulary per sector
Here it becomes multi-layered. Each product category brings its own technical vocabulary, which the respective EU regulation requires:
- batteries (Regulation 2023/1542): over 200 properties, from cell chemistry through recycled-content shares for lithium, cobalt and nickel to charge cycles and state of health
- textiles: fibre composition, dyes, microplastic risk class, washing symbols, recyclability
- electronics: repair index, component types, replaceability of individual components
- plus vocabularies for deforestation (EUDR), detergents, packaging (PPWR) and construction products (CPR)
A DPP therefore switches its technical vocabulary depending on the product category - and must still remain compatible with the same basic framework.
One context that holds everything together
So that these sources do not turn into babel, a single JSON-LD context binds all the vocabularies together. Every term has exactly one home in it: a stable address (URI) under which its definition can be looked up.
This is more than tidiness. A DPP has to remain verifiable for ten years and longer. If an authority reads a passport issued in 2026 in 2034, recycledContent must still mean exactly the same as today. Stable addresses are the precondition for the platform, archive, audit and authority all pointing to the same definition.
39 languages in one data structure
Transpareo carries product texts multilingually in a compact structure: one field carries {"de": "Wasser", "en": "Water"} instead of cumbersome repetition. This keeps the data volume small and allows a consumer simply to read the desired language and fall back to English if needed. 39 languages, including all 24 official EU languages, are thereby covered without special logic.
What this means for your platform choice
Three questions separate an interoperable solution from an island solution:
- Does the platform speak the established standards (GS1, EPCIS, OpenEPCIS, schema.org) or its own schema that only it understands?
- Can it use the appropriate technical vocabulary per product category without you having to rebuild the data model?
- Are the terms used documented under stable, permanently resolvable addresses?
If the answer is yes three times, your DPP stays readable - today, across a change of provider, and beyond the statutory retention period.