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 jointly developed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and Dun & Bradstreet Corporation in 1998. The current version consists of more than 18000 terms.

The management and development of the UNSPSC Code is coordinated by GS1 US, formerly the Uniform Code Council (UCC). The UNDP appointed GS1 US code manager in May 2003. The code manager is responsible for ensuring compliance with the principles of the UNSPSC as well as the integrity of the code schema. 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 the following languages: English, Français (French), Deutsch (German), Español (Spanish), Italiano (Italian), Japanese, Korean, Vlaams (Dutch), Chinese, Português (Portuguese), and Danish (Denmark). 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.