Consuming Linked data in Supply Chains: Enabling data visibility via Linked Pedigrees

COLD/ISWC 2013, 22nd October, Sydney

Consuming Linked data in Supply Chains:
Enabling data visibility via Linked
Pedigrees
http://windermere.aston.ac.uk/~monika/papers/SolankiAndBrewster_COLD2013.pdf

Monika Solanki and Christopher Brewster
Aston Business School
Aston University, Birmingham, UK

m.solanki@aston.ac.uk

Consuming Linked data in Supply Chains Enabling data visibility via Linked Pedigrees


Motivation: Visibility in Supply Chains




Motivation
Visibility*
“Visibility is the ability to know exactly where things are at any
point in time, or where they have been, and why”.
Critical to achieving visibility in the end-to-end supply chain
is collaboration between trading partners.
Successful collaboration largely depends on the ease and
timeliness with which real-time process and product
knowledge can be shared between trading partners and
utilised in decision making.

*http://www.gs1.org/docs/GS1_SupplyChainVisibility_
WhitePaper.pdf



Motivation
Existing mechanisms for sharing data and information
along supply chains are highly restricted and extremely
complex.
There is a lack of information models that facilitate the
exchange of end-to-end supply chain product and process
knowledge.
There is a very conservative “need-to-know” attitude such
that essentially information ﬂows only “one-up, one down”.
Information and knowledge need to be interlinked, shared and
made available consistently along the supply chains not least
for regulatory reasons but also due to increasing consumer
demands of being able to track and trace commodities.




Motivation
Supply chain domains where data interlinking and sharing
issues are most prevalent: The Agri-food and The
Healthcare sector.
Agri-food supply chains,
Tracking and tracing of foods in the context of health and
safety: prevent and respond to food emergencies (mad cow
disease, and most recently E. Coli).
Growing desire on the part of food consumers to know
more about their food.

Healthcare
Capture and document the chain of custody and the chain
of ownership of a pharmaceutical product as it moves
through the supply chain.




Outline
Linked Pedigrees
Reference Architecture
Linked Pedigree Communication Protocol
Exemplifying Linked Pedigrees
Conclusions




Background: Pedigrees
Most widely prevalent in the pharmaceutical industry.
Pedigree(e-pedigree) is an audit trail that records the path
and ownership of a drug as it moves through the supply
chain.
Each stakeholder involved in the manufacture or
distribution of the drug adds information to the pedigree.
The Pedigree standard* provides an XML schema for the
description of the life history of a product.
“Event based Pedigree”: utilises EPCglobal’s EPCIS
speciﬁcation for capturing events in the supply chain and
generating pedigrees based on a relevant subset of the
captured events.
* http://www.gs1.org/gsmp/kc/epcglobal/pedigree



Linked Pedigrees
Datasets described and accessed using linked data
principles.
Encapsulate the knowledge required to trace and track
products in supply chains on a Web scale.
Facilitate the interlinking of a variety of related and relevant
data, i.e., product master data with event data.
Based on a domain independent data model for the
sharing of knowledge among Semantic Web/Linked data
aware systems deployed for the tracking, tracing and data
capture.
Product knowledge shared among partners as products
physically ﬂow downstream or upstream in the supply
chain.




Knowledge Encapsulation in Linked
Pedigrees
Direct linkages in the linked pedigree generated by each supply
chain trading partner
URIs for
product master data: product identiﬁers, sensor based
product related information, e.g., storage conditions.
transaction data: invoices, order numbers, quantity.
consignment information: logistics, receiver, shipper,
location
Data interpretation rules if any.

URIs for the pedigree datasets from the stakeholders in the
immediate upstream or downstream of the supply chain.




OntoPedigree: A CO design pattern
Competency questions:
Who is the creator of the pedigree ?
What is the supply chain creation status of a given
pedigree?
Which are the business transactions recorded against a
particular consignment?
Which products have been shipped together?
Which other pedigrees are included in the received
pedigree?




OntoPedigree: A CO design pattern




Event based Linked Pedigrees
EPC*: Electronic Product Code A universal identifier encoded
on data carriers that gives a unique, serialised identity to a
specific physical object.
EPCIS*: Electronic Product Code Information Services A
ratified(2007) EPCglobal standard for sharing EPC related
information between trading partners in a supply chain.
LinkedEPCIS*: an open source Java API and a reference
implementation for capturing, storing and querying EPCIS
events.
*http://www.gs1.org/sites/default/files/docs/tds/tds_1_7-Std.pdf
*http://www.gs1.org/gsmp/kc/epcglobal/epcis
*http://code.google.com/p/linked-epcis/
*http://windermere.aston.ac.uk/~monika/papers/SolankiDeRiVE2013.pdf



Generating Linked Pedigrees event URIs
Events incorporated in pedigree creation
commissioning: uniquely identifying products
shipping: associating products with orders
receiving: associating received products with orders
Pedigree Component
Product information

Linking relationship
hasProductInfo

Consignment information

hasConsignmentInfo

Transaction information

hasTransactionInfo


Resource identiﬁer
Product data URIs
Serialised product data URIs
Commissioning events Object event/Aggregation event URIs
Shipping events Transaction event URIs



An open, scalable and decentralised architecture.
Every actor in the supply chain manages its own datastore.
Linked pedigrees obtained via a pull model.
Shared data models, vocabularies, Web based and mobile
application components are provided as cloud based
services.




Agri-food supply chain




Reference Architecture: Key Components
Linked Pedigree Manager agent
An integral component of every stakeholder
participating in event based tracking and tracing.
Interfaces between the EPCIS event store and
external systems.
RESTfully queries linked pedigrees from
upstream/downstream stakeholders.
Validates electronic information recorded on
received physical goods against the query results.
Generates the pedigree on the ﬂy from the
knowledge curated in the event data stores of the
stakeholder, assigns it a URI and include outgoing
links to external datasets.




Reference Architecture: Key Components
Integrated Linked Pedigree Store
Pedigree deﬁnitions include pedigree URIs
from the upstream or downstream
stakeholders.
They can be sequentially traversed, to
eventually construct an ordered chain of
pedigrees.
Access control restrictions mean that it may not be possible for
stakeholders themselves to obtain complete information related
to products and consignments from every other stakeholder.
The integrated linked pedigree store provides a service that can
facilitate the end-to-end dereferencing of linked pedigrees in the
supply chain.




Linked Pedigree Communication Protocol




Linked Pedigrees: Agri-food supply chains

The tomato supply chain involves thousands of farmers,
hundreds of traders and few retail groups




Linked Pedigrees: Agri-food supply chains




Agri-food supply chains
Pedigree sent from Farmer to Trader

### http://fispace.aston.ac.uk/franzfarmer/pedigrees/
FranzTomatoFarmerPedigree123
fsc:FranzTomatoFarmerPedigree123 rdf:type ped:Pedigree;
ped:hasSerialNumber "tomPed123"^^xsd:String;
ped:hasStatus ped:Initial;
ped:hasConsignmentInfo fci:FranzFarmerObjectEvent10,
fci:FranzFarmerAggregationEvent6;
ped:hasTransactionInfo fti:FranzFarmerShippingEvent12;
ped:hasProductInfo ftp:FranzTomatoesMay2013Data.



Agri-food supply chains
Pedigree sent from Trader to Distributor

### http://fispace.aston.ac.uk/joetrader/
pedigrees/JoeTomatoTraderPedigree456
jsc:JoeTomatoTraderPedigree456 rdf:type ped:Pedigree
ped:hasSerialNumber "joeTradePed456"^^xsd:String;
ped:hasStatus ped:Intermediate;
ped:hasConsignmentInfo jci:JoeTraderObjectEvent20,
jci:JoeTraderObjectEvent30;
ped:hasTransactionInfo jti:JoeTraderTransactionEvent40;
ped:hasProductInfo jpi:JoeTradesMay2013Info.
ped:hasReceivedPedigree fsc:FranzTomatoFarmerPedigree123,
bsc:BobTomatoFarmerPedigree123.



Conclusions
Data visibility (tracking and tracing) in supply chains has
received considerable attention in recent years.
Semantic Web standards, ontologies and linked data can
be utilised to curate and represent real time supply chain
knowledge via “linked pedigrees”.
“OntoPedigree” a CO design pattern provides a
minimalistic abstraction for designing domain speciﬁc
pedigree ontologies.
The reference architecture and the linked pedigree
communication protocol exemplify pedigree exchange
between supply chain partners.
The proposed approach is domain independent and can
be widely applied to most scenarios of traceability.




Future?



Consuming Linked data in Supply Chains: Enabling data visibility via Linked Pedigrees

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