Product data

Where should a product fact live, and which system owns it?

Do not choose one system to be the source of truth for every product fact. That is the answer to most architecture questions here. A fact has an owner, the owner is the system where it is created and maintained, and different facts have different owners. A composition claim comes from the supplier. A price comes from commerce. An emissions figure comes from the calculation that produced it and travels with its method.

The second decision is level. Model, variant, SKU, lot, serial and item are not interchangeable. A passport that promises item-level history on a record that only exists at model level cannot deliver it, and no later integration fixes that.

The third is what happens when a fact changes. Overwrite, version and new product are three different answers with three different consequences for anything already published.

The fourteen pages here cover data spaces and Catena-X, the difference between a passport, a digital twin and an asset administration shell, EPCIS events, PACT carbon exchange, syndication to retailers and marketplaces, and UNTP. They also cover running without a PIM, because most businesses do.