How it works
Choose who you are to see your path through ADIF.
As a manufacturer
- Request an accountSign up with your company name. The registry operator approves it before you can register anything.
- Upload the sheet you already keepCSV, Excel or JSON, with your own column names. No new template to fill in.
- Check the suggested matchesEach column is matched to a passport field with a confidence score. Low-confidence matches are flagged for you. Save your choices as a template for next season.
- RegisterEvery design, colour-and-size and serialised item gets its ADID, and you get the full list back.
- Print the QR on the labelPut the ADID address into the QR code on the hang tag or care label.
- Keep it up to dateCorrect a detail at any time. A new revision is saved and the printed address keeps working.
As a shopper
- Scan the QR on the labelAny phone camera works. No app and no account.
- The address opens its passportThe ADID in the QR leads straight to the record for that exact colour and size, or that exact shirt.
- Read the public detailsFibre, origin, care, recycled content, carbon footprint and the documents the maker published.
- See its other colours and sizesStep to the rest of the design, or to similar products from other makers.
What happens to the details you upload
Here is one row of Lanka Threads' sheet going through the registry. Each column is matched to a passport field, then filed at the level it describes and shown only to the people allowed to see it.
- Design Code
- Colour
- Size
- GTIN
- Fabric Composition
- Carbon Footprint
- Serial Number
- Facility ID
- Batch
- Unit Price (USD)
The design
Public, shared by every variant
Each colour and size
Public
Each shirt
Opens by scan, never listed
Private
Manufacturer and authorities only
Not stored
Columns you leave unmatched
Your file
Read into memory so you can review the matches. It is not kept as a file, and an unfinished review expires after two hours.
What is kept
Only the columns you confirm, stored in the registry database as passport records. Prices, stock levels and anything else you leave unmatched are dropped.
Changes
An edit saves a new revision; earlier ones stay in the history. Nothing is deleted. A withdrawn product shows a notice instead of its details, and its address is never reused.
Seals
Every revision carries a fingerprint of the one before it, so an edit made outside the registry is detected.
Who sees what
The public sees product, sustainability and compliance details. Supply-chain and production details are visible only to you and to authorities. A new field is private until it is classified.
Accounts
Passwords are stored as salted hashes. Sign-ins, uploads and registrations are written to an access log.
| Information | Public | Manufacturer | Authorities |
|---|---|---|---|
| Product: style, colour, size, fibre, origin, care, barcode | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Sustainability and compliance documents | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Serial number of one shirt | By scan only | Yes | Yes |
| Supply chain: factory, other operators, due diligence | No | Own products | Yes |
| Production: batch, production date, purchase order | No | Own products | Yes |
| Revision history | No | Own products | Yes |
Under the hood
ADID: identity and hierarchical resolution
| Family (the garment design) | /adid/{familyUUID} |
|---|---|
| Variant (one colour and size) | /adid/{familyUUID}/ocean-blue_m |
| Instance (one physical garment) | /adid/{familyUUID}/ocean-blue_m/{instanceUUID} |
The family and instance segments are random version-4 UUIDs, so they are globally unique and carry no product details. The variant segment is the colour and size, issued at registration and unique within its family. The variant also has its own UUID, kept in its record.
Each ADID is issued once and is not reassigned. A later correction to colour, size or any other detail creates a new revision of the record, and the address stays the same. Barcodes (GTIN, and GTIN plus serial) are stored as other names for the same record and open it through /01/{gtin}. Batch numbers are passport data rather than part of the address.
Status: this is ADID v2, a proposed post-freeze design. The evaluated specification is v1.0 (style code, colour and size, serial), and its grammar file is unchanged. Every v2 address is also valid under the v1.0 path grammar.
CDM: canonical product data
The CDM has 54 passport fields drawn from the EU Ecodesign Regulation (2024/1781, Annex III and Articles 5 and 7), GS1 EPCIS 2.0, the UN Transparency Protocol and the EU textile-labelling regulation (1007/2011). Each field records the clause it comes from. Four are required: style, product identifier, manufacturer operator ID and fibre composition. The vocabulary is versioned and governed separately; manufacturers cannot change it from this site.
Passports are written as JSON-LD. A variant's passport includes its family's details, and an instance's passport includes its family's and variant's details.
Gateway: from a factory's spreadsheet to the CDM
Each column passes through up to four matching stages, stopping at the first that is confident enough.
Known names
An exact match against a curated list of column names factories use for each field.
Similar spelling
Typos and reordered words, accepted at a score of 85 or more out of 100.
Similar meaning
A small offline language model, accepted at 85 or more. Switched off on copies without the model.
Looks like the values
Country codes, barcodes, customs codes and fibre names, accepted at 75 or more.
Each match gets a confidence calibrated on example files with known answers, and anything below 0.96 is flagged for a person to check. Confirmed choices can be saved as a template; saving under an existing name adds a revision and keeps the earlier ones.
What has been measured
The gateway (held-out files, evaluated version v1.0, frozen 10 October 2026)
Column-matching accuracy (F1) rose from 0.54 with spelling similarity alone to 0.63 with all four stages. Confidence calibration error was 0.054, against a target of 0.10. The accuracy target of 0.85 was not met; that is reported as a finding. Two of the three test files were compiled rather than taken from a factory, and none came from a Sri Lankan manufacturer. The evaluation is controlled and synthetic: it shows that the prototype works and how the matching methods compare, not how it would perform in real Sri Lankan factories.
ADID v2 resolution (synthetic catalogue, 3,632 records, 12 October 2026)
| What was tested | Result |
|---|---|
| Printed addresses unchanged after colour or size corrections | 704 of 704 v2 addresses, against 0 of 528 v1.0 addresses |
| Addresses, barcodes and serials that opened the right record, on either of two registry nodes | All of those tested |
| Colour and size matches found despite inconsistent spelling | 97% found, against 28% for exact matching |
| Restricted details shown in public views | None in 3,632 views |
| Edits made outside the registry detected by the revision seals | 200 of 200, with no false alarms |
| Search time at about 38,000 records | About 2 milliseconds |
Several of these results follow from the design and confirm that the software behaves as specified: random IDs do not collide, a hash chain catches edits, and v1.0 addresses change because they contain colour and size. The catalogue is generated, not factory data. The spelling variations were written by the same person who wrote the matching, so the 97% shows that capitals, spaces and hyphens are handled, not every spelling. "Grey" and "Gray" are still missed. Timings are from a development machine.
What this prototype does not claim
- It is not a legally designated DPP service, registry or authority, and it is not an official standard.
- It does not imply certification or compliance with any regulation. The textile delegated act under the Ecodesign Regulation is not yet adopted.
- Matching is not fully accurate, and a high confidence score does not guarantee that a match is correct. The workflow is human-assisted: the system proposes, a person confirms. The measured accuracy is reported above, including the targets that were not met.
- This registry is a research registry and resolver. It is not the EU digital product passport registry set up under Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/1778, and registering a product here is not registration with the EU.
- The harmonised DPP standards EN 18216 and EN 18219 to EN 18223 (Implementing Decision (EU) 2026/1736) define the horizontal DPP infrastructure. ADIF does not replace them; it studies an apparel-specific mapping workflow and product grouping that those standards do not themselves provide.
- The four required passport fields used here are a minimum set defined for this study, not a legal list. Textile-specific requirements will come from a delegated act that has not been adopted.
- No conformance with EN 18219 (DPP unique identifiers) or GS1 Digital Link is claimed. Barcodes are supported as linked identifiers.
- Account approval on this site is prototype governance, not official accreditation. Passwords and API keys are used, not digital signatures. The revision seals detect edits; they do not stop an operator with database access from rewriting a whole history consistently.
- The site has prototype safeguards (hashed passwords, form tokens, sign-in throttling, upload limits, expiring uploads and an access log). It has not had a security assessment and is not presented as secure for production use.
- The example products, including Lanka Threads and the Ceylon Breeze Crew Tee, are invented example data.