Digital Birth Certificates

The digital birth certificate is a semantic online format for describing any product, person, animal, building, structure, or document. The counterpart for services is a digital service certificate. The birth certificate contains all the information about a product’s identity, manufacture, options, condition, service record, etc. It starts as an online record of manufacture, hosted in the cloud by the manufacturer. When someone buys the product, the certificate’s ownership link points to the new owner. The certificate doesn’t move, so a manufacturer has a complete record of every product it has ever made, and the ownership links stay current throughout each product’s lifetime. When a product’s life cycle ends, the ownership pointer helps retrieve it for recycling. A single product, like a car, will have a digital birth certificate that links back to hundreds of birth certificates for all its parts and also links to all the service certificates for all the work that has ever been performed on it.

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Today almost no product has a digital birth certificate of any kind. In some cases, you can type your product’s serial number into a manufacturer’s web site to learn about recalls or service status, but these are simply ad hoc databases created for a single purpose.

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Here are some of the companies and groups helping build this future:

Related Terms

Personal Data Locker