Please note that this specification is suitable for pre-production pilot implementations.
Vocabulary
A credential is only worth exchanging if the party receiving it reads it the same way the party issuing it wrote it. The schemas on the specification pages settle structure, which fields exist and which are mandatory. This section settles meaning.
Vocabulary Architecture
UNTP credentials must be semantically interoperable with global standards (W3C VCDM, schema.org, GS1) and with the regulatory rulebooks of every jurisdiction. The vocabulary architecture is designed to achieve this through layered integration.
Four kinds of vocabulary, each owned by whoever is in a position to maintain it. Terms come from the UN/CEFACT Web Vocabulary, a dictionary shared across trade, transport, finance and regulation, which UNTP draws on rather than duplicates; the Core Vocabulary page shows the subset it uses. Classification comes from the published taxonomies of conformity topics and performance metrics.
Requirements are different, because no central dictionary could define the criteria of every scheme and regulation in the world. Scheme owners publish their own, and the Conformity Vocabulary Catalog says how, so that a criterion can be referenced unambiguously from any credential. Industry extensions add sector-specific terms without replacing the shared ones.
What UNTP owns is the arrangement. A credential type is a composition of terms the dictionary already defines, which is why the credentials and the vocabulary are versioned separately.
The pages in this section
Core Vocabulary is the dictionary. UNTP has no vocabulary of its own: it uses a subset of the UN/CEFACT Web Vocabulary, and that page is the subset, filtered to the terms the current JSON-LD context actually references and with every definition taken from the published vocabulary rather than restated. Go there to find out what a property means.
Conformity Vocabulary is how a conformity scheme publishes its own criteria so that others can reference them. The dictionary cannot define the criteria of every scheme in the world, so schemes publish their own catalogues and UNTP says how.
Claims and Assessments is the practice. It brings the credentials, the scheme catalogues and the two published taxonomies together, and covers how to make claims and assessments that someone else can interpret, compare and aggregate.
Extension Vocabularies is how a sector adds the terms the shared dictionary will never carry, without breaking the core. It covers where properties may be added, how to put them in a namespace you control, and what happens to one that has no namespace at all.
The taxonomies themselves, conformity topics and performance metrics, are published in the UN/CEFACT vocabulary rather than reproduced here. Links to both are on the Claims and Assessments page.