Explainer

What is a Digital Product Passport?

Explore the interconnected concepts behind DPP interoperability — from EU regulations to semantic web technologies.

DPP Knowledge Graph — Hover to explore relationships

issuedByhasExtensionhasChemistryhasExtensionhasExtensionrecyclabilitycompliesWithpartOfregulatedBycomposesCorerequiredrequiredcomposesCorerequiredrequiredDigital ProductPassportManufacturerBatteryExtensionChemistryLCA-EFExtensionSoCExtensionRecycledContentEU BatteryRegulationSupplyChainTractus-XProfileBattery PassProfile

Schema Architecture — Core + Extensions

The Shared Core Schema provides 17 universal fields that apply to any product, while extension modules add domain-specific data. Initiative profiles compose the core with specific extensions — for example, the Tractus-X Battery Profile requires the Battery and LCA-EF extensions, while the Battery Pass Profile requires Battery and Substances of Concern.

LCA-EF ExtensionSoC ExtensionBattery ExtensionShared Core Schema v0.2

Initiative Profiles — How Extensions Compose

Each DPP initiative defines a profile that specifies which extensions are required and which are optional.

Tractus-X Battery Profile

Catena-X / Tractus-X Initiative

CORE17 universal fields
REQUIREDBattery + LCA-EF extensions
OPTIONALSubstances of Concern

Focuses on carbon footprint and supply chain transparency through the LCA/Environmental Footprint extension.

Battery Pass Profile

Global Battery Alliance

CORE17 universal fields
REQUIREDBattery + SoC extensions
OPTIONALLCA/Environmental Footprint

Emphasizes EU Battery Regulation compliance with hazardous substance declarations via the Substances of Concern extension.

What is a Digital Product Passport?

A Digital Product Passport (DPP) is a structured, machine-readable record that describes a product's identity, composition, environmental impact, and lifecycle data. Mandated by the EU's Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), DPPs aim to make product sustainability information transparent and accessible across the entire value chain.

Why Does Interoperability Matter?

Multiple independent initiatives — Catena-X / Tractus-X, the Global Battery Alliance Battery Pass, and CIRPASS — are creating DPP schemas in parallel. Without interoperability, manufacturers must maintain separate passports for each ecosystem, regulators can't cross-reference data, and circular economy actors lose traceability across borders.

Linked Data as the Bridge

Linked Data technologies — RDF, JSON-LD, SPARQL, and OWL — provide a universal graph model where every entity has a globally unique URI. By normalizing DPPs into this shared semantic model, data from different initiatives can be merged, queried, and federated without custom point-to-point integrations.

Shared Core + Extensions

Our approach defines a product-agnostic core schema with 17 universal fields (manufacturer, model, production date, provenance tracking) plus three modular extension schemas: Battery (chemistry, performance, materials, durability, circularity), Substances of Concern (REACH/RoHS compliance declarations), and LCA/Environmental Footprint (carbon footprint, GHG Protocol scopes, impact categories). Each extension can be composed independently, enabling the schema to support new product categories without modifying the core.

Initiative Profiles

Profiles define how each DPP initiative maps onto the core + extensions architecture. The Tractus-X Battery Profile composes the core schema with the Battery and LCA-EF extensions (with Substances of Concern as optional), reflecting Catena-X's emphasis on carbon footprint and supply chain transparency. The Battery Pass Profile composes the core with the Battery and SoC extensions (with LCA-EF as optional), reflecting the GBA's focus on EU Battery Regulation compliance and hazardous substance declarations. Each profile specifies its required and optional extensions, enabling adapters to produce correctly structured normalized outputs.

EU Battery Regulation

Starting February 2027, industrial, electric vehicle, and light-means-of-transport batteries placed on the EU market must carry a digital passport. The regulation requires data on carbon footprint, recycled content, chemistry, performance, and end-of-life handling — all fields covered by our schema extensions.

Enabling the Circular Economy

DPP interoperability enables circular economy actors — recyclers, refurbishers, second-life battery operators — to access standardized product data regardless of which DPP initiative the original manufacturer used. This lowers barriers to material recovery, performance assessment, and regulatory compliance.

See it in action

Try the platform yourself — resolve identifiers, normalize passports, and explore data as a semantic graph.