UNSPSC

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

UNSPSC is the acronym for the United Nations Standard Products and Services Code. UNSPSC is a coding system to classify both products and services for use throughout the global eCommerce marketplace. The UNSPSC was created upon the signature of a Memorandum of Understanding signed on September 29, 1998 by Mr. John S. Svendsen the director of the Inter-agency Procurement Services Office (IAPSO) of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and on November 1, 1998 by Mr. Lawrence M. Barth a Vice President of the Dun & Bradstreet Corporation. The development of the first version was overseen by Mr. Peter R. Benson who was also responsible for the design and development of the code management procedure as a modification of the Delphi statistical forecasting method. The process allowed for the rapid development of consensus without dominance or influence.

A not for profit membership association ECCMA was formed in 1999 to manage and promote the UNSPSC until March, 2003, with the release of version 6.0315. The UNDP then appointed GS1 US as code manager in May 2003 and ECCMA develops the ECCMA Open Technical Dictionary (eOTD) and the international standards ISO 22745 and ISO 8000.

GS1 US is responsible for overseeing code change requests, industry revision projects, issuing regularly scheduled updates to the code, communications with members, as well as special projects and initiatives as determined both by the UNDP and member requests.

The codeset is available in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Chinese, Portuguese, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Hungarian. PDF versions of the codeset can be downloaded for free at the UNSPSC.org website. Excel versions of the codeset are available for a nominal cost.

Complete information about the UNSPSC is available at UNSPSC.

An interesting part of UNSPSC is its potential contribution to the Semantic Web, by means of formalizations into ontologies (by OWL and RDF schemas. It can be also related to UDDI, adding new potential to web services.

[edit] External links

• United Nations Standard Products and Services Code Homepage
• UNSPSC FAQs: United Nations Standard Products and Services Code
• Papers White papers describing UNSPSC use
• Paper Products and Services Ontologies: A Methodology for Deriving OWL Ontologies from Industrial Categorization Standards, Int'l Journal on Semantic Web & Information Systems (IJSWIS), Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 72-99, January-March 2006.
• Paper GenTax: A Generic Methodology for Deriving OWL and RDF-S Ontologies from Hierarchical Classifications, Thesauri, and Inconsistent Taxonomies, Proceedings of the 4th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2007), June 3-7, Innsbruck, Austria, in: E. Fraconi, M. Kifer, and W. May (Eds.): ESWC 2007, LNCS 4519, Springer 2007, pp.129-144.
• Paper A Quantitative Analysis of Product Categorization Standards: Content, Coverage, and Maintenance of eCl@ss, UNSPSC, eOTD, and the RosettaNet Technical Dictionary, Knowledge and Information Systems (KAIS), Springer, DOI: 10.1007/s10115-006-0054-2, 2007.gh