What is Digital Data Management?

Every product tells a story: what it is, who makes it, what it contains, how to use it, how to recycle it. Today that story is scattered — some of it printed on the packaging, some in a retailer's database, some in a PDF on the manufacturer's website. Regulation is now pulling it together: the EU's Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) requires a digital product passport for more and more product groups — a machine-readable, always-current record of the product, reachable directly from the product itself.

Digital Data Management (DDM) is the OpenEPCIS application for exactly this job. It is where you write the product's story once, as structured GS1 master data, and where everything derived from that single record is managed: the public passport page a consumer reaches by scanning the QR code, the links the scan can lead to, the rules about who may see which detail, and the statistics about how the passport is actually used in the wild.

The key idea to hold on to is that DDM never asks you to maintain the same fact twice. A product's description, its country of origin, its certificates — each lives in one place, the master-data record. The passport page renders from it. The resolver derives links from it. The GS1 network is fed from it. When the record changes, everything downstream follows.

How a scan becomes a passport

To understand the application, it helps to walk once along the path a single scan takes:

It starts long before the scan, in the catalog workspace, where you describe the product. DDM stores that description in the OpenEPCIS Catalog as GS1 Web Vocabulary data — the same vocabulary the whole GS1 world speaks, so nothing you enter is locked into this one application.

The address printed into the QR code is a GS1 Digital Link: a normal web address built from the product's GS1 identifier, for example https://id.your-domain.com/01/09521000551015. The 01 is GS1's code for "what follows is a GTIN". This construction is the quiet foundation of everything else: because the product's identifier is also a web address, anything in the world that knows the GTIN can find the product's data — no app required, no proprietary lookup service, just a URL.

That address does not point at a fixed page. It points at the resolver, a small routing service that keeps, for every identifier, a list of typed destinations — the product information page, a sustainability report, safety instructions. This list is called the linkset, and the indirection it provides is deliberate: the QR code on the packaging is printed once and lives for years, but where it leads can be changed any day, in DDM, without touching the packaging.

By default the resolver sends a scanning consumer to the public passport page, which renders the master-data record — but only the parts your access policy makes public. The same address shows more to a signed-in business partner and more again to an authority, which is how one printed code can serve three very different audiences.

Finally, every scan leaves a trace in Scan Analytics — deliberately anonymous, aggregated statistics that answer questions like "where is this product being scanned?" and "what information do scanners look for that we don't offer yet?".

A vocabulary for reading this guide

A few terms appear on every page of this guide, so here they are once, in plain language. The identifier a passport hangs on — a product's GTIN, a company's or location's GLN — is called the anchor. The record behind an anchor is its passport; the curated profile that decides which fields that passport offers (generic product, battery, textile, packaging…) is its passport type. The typed destinations the resolver serves for an anchor form its linkset. And every field of a passport carries an access tier — Public, Authorized only or Restricted — which decides who gets to see its value.

The guide, chapter by chapter

DDM is one module of the OpenEPCIS platform; how it relates to the EPCIS repository, the resolver and the vocabulary tooling is described in the platform overview.

When something goes wrong

DDM translates every API failure into a plain-language message, so an error you see on screen should already tell you what to do. For reference, the most common ones:

One safety net is worth knowing from day one: every list page offers Open by GTIN (or GLN). Even when a list will not load, a record can always be opened directly by its identifier.