Regulatory Digital Product Passports as a Catalyst for U. S. Supply Chain Visibility
Sectoral rollout. ESPR is designed as a staged rollout across prioritized product groups. Batteries provide a concrete DPP precedent through the EU Battery Regulation, supported by implementation guidance from industry consortia, and are also one of the prioritized ESPR working-plan domains highlighted in MITRE ' s analysis [ 1 ].
UN TRANSPARENCY PROTOCOL( UNTP)
UNTP is a UN / CEFACT-led interoperability protocol intended to enable " transparency at scale " to counter greenwashing and support credible ESG evidence exchange across supply chains. Unlike ESPR, UNTP is not a regulation and does not rely on centralized enforcement; it is designed so data can remain with its natural owner while being exchanged in structured, machine-readable and verifiable forms. UNTP ' s specifications and evolving schemas are published openly and iterated via the UNTP repository and associated documentation [ 3 ].
The UNTP interoperability model also aligns closely with the architectural principles of emerging industrial dataspaces such as the International Data Spaces Association( IDSA) framework and Gaia-X. Dataspaces are designed around a core principle that data should remain under the control of its natural owner while being exchanged through standardized, policy-governed interfaces rather than centralized repositories. UNTP’ s emphasis on decentralized ownership, verifiable exchange, machine-readable claims, and interoperable evidence structures maps directly to this dataspace paradigm. In this framing, a supply chain model serialized using SPDX 3.1 can be understood as a portable dataspace asset: a structured, machine-readable representation of product identity, provenance, composition, logistics events, and conformance information that can be selectively shared across organizational boundaries while preserving governance controls. Positioning DPP ecosystems within the broader dataspace movement is important because it connects supply chain transparency initiatives to established governance and interoperability models already being adopted in manufacturing, logistics, energy, and critical infrastructure sectors.
SPDX 3.1, THE OMG STANDARDS ECOSYSTEM, AND THE DIGITAL TWIN THREAD
The SPDX 3.1 release( RC published January 2026) extends this foundation with a dedicated Supply Chain Profile, with classes such as sc: TransportEvent for custody and logistics events, and a Hardware Profile, with classes such as hw: Chip and hw: Component for physical component identity, enabling a single SPDX element to carry software, hardware, and supply-chain-event semantics simultaneously [ 7 ].
Figures 1 and 2 illustrate how SPDX 3.1 SupplyChain-profile data structures can model a realworld manufacturing ecosystem and support aggregation into strategic supply chain metagraphs. This example uses a representative outdoor security camera assembled by ACME Security Products Inc.( model ACME CAM-5200).
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