Digital Product Passport for Circular Economy: A Review of Semantic Web Vocabularies and Requirements for Interoperability
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The European Union's Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR, EU 2024/1781) mandates Digital Product Passports (DPP) for electronics and appliances by 2027, creating an urgent need for machine-readable product lifecycle data to support the circular economy. Semantic Web vocabularies (RDF/OWL) can enable interoperability across supply chains, yet the landscape of ontologies covering DPP, after-sales service, and warranty remains scattered and not systematically compared. This review presents a systematic survey of such vocabularies: we define a reproducible methodology (Linked Open Vocabularies, literature, standards), inclusion and exclusion criteria, and a multi-dimensional comparison grid. We analyse coverage of product lifecycle, DPP/ESPR alignment, warranty and return workflows, and adoption. Our findings indicate that product identification and lifecycle stages are well covered by several ontologies, whereas machine-readable warranty payment rules and standardised return/workflow models are largely absent. We discuss implications for DPP deployment in the circular economy and recommendations for standardisation. JEL codes: O33 (Technological Change; R&D); Q55 (Environmental Economics: Technological Innovation); L86 (Information and Internet Services)
