Data sharing is easy. Understanding is harder.
Digital Product Passports (DPPs) are often discussed as a way to make product information more accessible. In practice, their value depends on something more basic: whether organisations can exchange data and still understand it in the same way.
In SwePass, Linköping University (LiU) contributes technical expertise focused on the practical implementation of the project’s digital components. This includes work on technical standards for data sharing and semantic interoperability, and bringing in concrete technical implementations—such as ontologies and data-sharing platforms—from related research projects.
LiU coordinates SwePass work that brings together and consolidates knowledge on semantic interoperability solutions and technical platforms. The university also contributes to a project demonstrator that puts semantic interoperability into practice, with Ragn-Sells leading the demonstrator work.
Why SwePass is relevant from a research perspective
For LiU, SwePass provides an opportunity to apply and evaluate technical solutions developed in other research projects, and to identify new research questions grounded in industry needs exposed through the demonstrators. With a main focus on semantic interoperability, cross-organisational and cross-industry data sharing becomes a particularly demanding test case—exactly the kind of environment where limitations in current approaches become visible.
Key challenges: cross-domain meaning, not just data exchange
A central methodological challenge for DPPs is semantic interoperability across domains. DPPs are expected to support many different use cases, and the consumer perspective is only one of them.
– One of the key challenges is the cross-domain semantic interoperability that DPPs require, where data exchange may need to happen between organisations that traditionally belong to different industries, and may have very different viewpoints on the data, says Eva Blomqvist, professor at Linköping University.
SwePass also highlights the collector and recycler perspective: DPPs could provide information on how to treat a product at end of life. But that requires data to move between organisations that do not normally collaborate or share data—and that may interpret the product and its information in very different ways. While it is technically possible to describe mappings between their data and world views, it also demands a deep understanding of what the data actually means, and may require organisations to adjust ways of working to make full use of the information.
A risk in today’s implementation landscape
LiU also points to a common disconnect between research and implementation: solutions are sometimes built without sufficient reuse of established standards and vocabularies, particularly those already well-established from a web and semantic web perspective. That can lead to unnecessary fragmentation—and make cross-domain implementation harder than it needs to be.
– A lot of the technical implementations we see today are re-inventing the wheel in many cases, i.e. they are not aware of all the technical standards and vocabularies, mostly from the web perspective, that are already well-established and available, says Eva Blomqvist.
At the same time, the gap can go both ways. Researchers may know technical standards in depth, but not always have the same understanding to current DPP and circular economy standardisation work or fast-moving industry needs. In SwePass, knowledge building and demonstrator implementation create a setting where those perspectives can meet—so that interoperability solutions are both technically sound and practically usable.
