6 posts tagged with "Feature"

The call for a more transparent and sustainable economy is loud and clear. We want to know where products come from, what they are made of, and how we can responsibly reuse them. Digital Product Passports (DPPs) are essential for this: they give each product its own passport detailing its lifecycle. The European Union is strongly committed to DPPs to encourage more sustainable choices. However, practical implementation is challenging and complex. Products travel the globe, through supply chains with numerous actors and diverse IT systems. How do we ensure that the data in a DPP in Spain is as usable and understandable as it is in the Netherlands or Vietnam? We need a "common language", a standard that ensures everyone interprets the same information in the same way. Without such a language, a DPP is like a product instruction manual in a language you don't speak. You see the words, but the instructions are lost on you.

The need for practical implementations of DPPs is precisely what we are addressing within our work, and we are addressing it from multiple perspectives. For instance, we have established a DPP Semantic Treehouse environment – https://dpp.vocabulary-hub.eu/ – which serves as the hub where the 'common language' for all product types can be hosted, managed, and shared. Beyond this environment, we are actively engaged in various projects, developing features to simplify the process of creating DPPs. But how does that work? Let's dive into it!

JSON Validator​

We’re excited to share that our new JSON validator is ready to use! This new validator helps you validate your JSON messages against the agreed schemas in your ecosystem.

With more and more ecosystems relying on JSON to share data, it became essential for us to have a JSON validator in addition to our XML validator. So, we teamed up with a group of students from the University of Groningen, and together we created a first version of this validator.

Semantic Treehouse is designed to maximize the reuse of common vocabularies (semantic standards) to ensure a shared understanding of the data. These vocabularies are assumed to be created through open standardization, meaning that they're created 'by the users, for the users'. Open standardization justifies what is essentially a top-down approach to interoperability: as soon as the standard is done, it is published in a central place and users are expected to comply by aligning their data to it.

However, there are various situations that would benefit from a more 'bottom-up' approach, i.e. where the information flow is reversed. Instead of Semantic Treehouse providing information on what vocabulary to use, users provide information on the usage of their data. This need arises in situation where, for example, there's only a loosely defined community where standards are not yet formed. Or when typical users don't have the resources or knowledge to work with semantic standards and make alignments. To overcome this hurdle, Semantic Treehouse has developed a new functionality that allows users to create an initial vocabulary based on their own sample data.

Sharing data across different sectors holds tremendous value. For example, to achieve EU climate goals, the exchange of carbon footprint data across various sectors is of great importance. Therefore, connecting different data sharing communities in these sectors is essential. However, sharing data across different sectors comes with challenges, as each sector develops its own vocabularies and tools. These vocabularies are not accessible across different sectors, and consequently, thus not being used in other sectors. To brigde this gap, a standardized solution is needed to exchange vocabularies across data sharing communities, enhancing the discoverability of vocabularies across different sectors.

Semantic Treehouse has a new front-end! At the end of November we rolled out the new front-end version 3 for all Semantic Treehouse environments. Although it is still a beta version (v3.0.0-beta), the new front-end fully covers all views from the previous environment and has been extensively tested so that using it is an immediate improvement.

Besides a new look and feel, many more improvements have been made in the new Semantic Treehouse front-end:

Domain-specific vocabularies are crucial for accurate and consistent data interpretation by different individuals and systems. These vocabularies provide a shared conceptualization of knowledge within a particular domain. We observe the emergence of these vocabularies in diverse formats such as Smart Data Models, HR Open and Open Trip Model, which express their vocabularies in JSON or XML schemas.