GS1 Romania - DIGITAL LINK

About

GS1 Digital Link, formerly known as the GS1 Web URI Structure standard, enables consistent representation of GS1 identification keys within web addresses to link to online information and services. It can be used with Linked Data technology and Web vocabularies such as schema.org and the GS1 Web vocabulary in order to express machine-interpretable facts about products, assets, locations, organisations etc. at any level of granularity.

GS1 Digital Link offers a solution

GS1 Digital Link “web-enables” barcodes by providing a simple, standards based structure for the data that is encoded in them, connecting consumers and patients to online information about a product. Information such as expiration dates, nutritional and medical product data, warranty registration, troubleshooting instructions—even social media links. The GS1 Digital Link standard makes all of this possible no matter what data carrier is used—even those that don’t include a URL. Connections to other sources of information are enabled through a lookup tool. Imagine a physical phone book or a list of contacts on your phone. When you look up a company (or person’s) name, it is connected—or “resolved”—to a phone number and to other relevant information, such as a physical address, email address, job title, etc. In a business-to-consumer context, industry will be able to use GS1 Digital Link to engage consumers and patients via apps and websites by simply scanning a barcode. Doing this will allow industry to engage more dynamically with consumers and patients and to share relevant information with them from across their entire enterprise. In a business-to-business context, GS1 Digital Link lays the foundation for connecting to wherever human—and machine-readable— information may be. It is envisioned that the same barcode used by consumers will be scannable at the checkout counter, thus setting the foundation for the future of codes on packaging. Use one barcode—online and offline The introduction of GS1 Digital Link does not mean that the use of the EAN/UPC barcode is changing. Quite the contrary: brand owners and retailers will still use the ubiquitous barcode for years to come—only now they have the future opportunity of migrating to a single, webenabled barcode.

LAYER CAKE

URI’S

The definition of the GS1 Digital Link URI – a syntax for GS1 identifiers in the form of a URL A GS1 Digital Link URI is a Web URI that encodes one or more GS1 Application Identifiers and their value(s) according to the structure defined in this standard. An identified item is anything identified by one or more GS1 element strings, including their encoding as a GS1 Digital Link URI, be it a product, location, organization, asset or anything else.

LINK TYPES

A link type (or linkType) defines the relationship between the identified item and the linked resource, such as a product information page, a warranty registration page, a related video etc. It does not specify the media type or any other characteristic of the linked resource as this information is provided by metadata describing the resource itself. GS1 Digital Link's 'link type' is simply a shorthand for link relation type. It is the label for the relationships between related entities, such as between a product and its information page, a medicine and its information leaflet or a company and its entry in a company register. By using defined link relation types, links between items and information about them are machine- discoverable. The machine in question – the one that makes links of different types discoverable and actionable – is called a “resolver.”

RESOLVERS

Fundamentally, a resolver is a Web server. The fundamental aim of GS1 Digital Link is to enable anyone to find answers to their questions about the thing in front of them. To do that, it is likely to be necessary to consult multiple resources. Furthermore, a user will want those resources to be directly relevant to them. That implies that GS1 Digital Link cannot just think in terms of URLs and link types, but must also consider the context of the request. What language does the user speak? For which country do they need information? The number of possible links to related information for a single item can quickly multiply.

APPS

Although apps are part of the story, there is no ‘standard GS1 Digital Link app’ and the standard itself does not define an app. This is because the potential applications of the standard are many and varied. The needs of an apparel manufacturer will differ significantly from a clinical practitioner’s needs. A logistics operator will want to interact with an identified object for very different reasons than, say, a consumer of beauty care products. So rather than offer a standardised app that would inevitably be compared with the many existing apps that include barcode scanners, GS1 took the decision to make open source code available under a permissive licence that implements the core of the standard. This is so that developers can create whatever app they choose and include GS1 Digital Link-based functionality as easily as possible.

LINKED DATA

Semantic Web/Linked Data technology provides an effective, standardised way to exchange factual data about data attributes and their values without the need to exchange long GS1 Digital Link URIs. The Semantic Web isn't just about putting data on the web. It is about making links, so that a person or machine can explore the web of data. With linked data, when you have some of it, you can find other, related, data.

HEALTHCARE

In Healthcare, the GS1 Digital Link standard helps reinforce the One-barcode initiative. Meaning, manufacturers, distributors and hospitals will still use the ubiquitous barcode for years to come, for many different purposes like traceability and point-of-care scanning. Yet, now withGS1 Digital Link, they have the opportunity of using a single barcode to access digital information about the product.