Building the Trusted Internet of Product Data for Digital Product Passport Ecosystems: The Role of Data Spaces, Asset Administration Shells, and European Business Wallets

Abstract

The Digital Product Passport (DPP) is emerging as a cornerstone of Europe’s transition towards a circular, transparent and data-driven economy. However, scaling DPP ecosystems across global supply chains requires an architecture that can scale across industries and borders while preserving interoperability, trust and data sovereignty. This paper establishes Data Spaces as a key unifying B2B backbone and enabler for a trusted Internet of Product Data (IoPD).

Data spaces natively address the three structural dimensions of DPP execution: sovereign usage control, federated semantic interoperability, and centralized or federated counterparty trust. Within this sovereign transport layer, technological components operate as flexible, interoperable building blocks adapted to sectoral requirements: (1) Semantic Data Modelling, where payloads accommodate the DSSC Blueprint four-level semantic architecture (vocabularies, ontologies, application profiles and schemas) serialized in W3C/JSON-LD, or leverage specialized industrial digital twin models such as the Asset Administration Shell (AAS, IEC63278) for multi-level asset aggregation; and (2) Trust and Identity Anchoring, in which counterparty authentication and non-repudiation can integrate eIDAS 2.0 European Business Wallets (EBWs) and Verifiable Credentials (VC), or leverage established PKI frameworks and X.509 certificates, based on domain maturity.

By evaluating cross-sectorial practical implementations across the tyre, textile, furniture, automotive, and semiconductor sectors, this paper demonstrates how a data-space-centric architecture enables multistakeholder value creation beyond regulatory compliance, driving European industrial competitiveness through data-driven circularity.

Keywords

Digital Product Passport, Data Spaces, Asset Administration Shell, Data Sovereignty, Circular Economy