Empowering Organizations in the Food Sector to Provide Potentially Unknown Parties Easy Access to Trusted Data. Discussion of a Web-based, Globally Applicable Solution Based on Well-established Standards and Technologies

Abstract

A number of the most relevant trends for the food sector require increased data sharing amongst different
stakeholders. However, apart from established communication methods in the business-to-business (B2B)
domain (e.g. bilateral exchange of EDI transactions or product master data synchronization), the level of
standardization is low. There is no consistent, reliable and standardized entry point through which interested
parties can easily discover and access data on products, shipments, parties, assets, or further business objects.
Against this background, this paper aims at contributing to address this issue. To this end, it employs a number
of prototypes and use cases to investigate the applicability of a new standard, GS1 Digital Link, in different
areas of application. Thereby, it touches upon brand-authorized data (e.g. product information pages, list of
retailers selling a given product), data for users of reusable transport items (e.g. temperature profiles provided
by IoT-empowered trays), consumer-oriented data (e.g. nutrition information, related videos), master data
pertaining to arbitrary business objects, service endpoints of EPCIS servers, and laboratory test data.
The analysis reveals that the technical ecosystem GS1 Digital Link provides (especially normative specifications
for resolvers, standardized link types, and consistent URI patterns) indeed represents an open, flexible,
scalable, and future-oriented solution approach, which is superior to existing, proprietary solutions in various
ways. In the course of the discussion, the paper also points to various open source projects intended to ease
the adoption of this standard.