Digital Passport Model Assessment Workbench: SHACL-based assessment, use-case coverage, and integration guidance for digital passport model ecosystems

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  1. Riccardo Boero ,  
  2. Miguel Las Heras Hernández
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Abstract

Digital Product Passports and Digital Material Passports are increasingly implemented through modular data model ecosystems that evolve across releases and interact with external sectoral models. This creates a practical model evaluation problem: model developers need reproducible evidence about model structure, constraint readiness, interoperability, use-case coverage, and integration risks before representative instance datasets are available. We present the Digital Passport Model Assessment Workbench (DP-AWB), an open-source software tool that computes deterministic assessment results directly from Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL) model specifications, where SHACL is used to describe the expected structure, fields, and constraints of linked data models. DP-AWB provides metrics for structural scale, typed and cardinality-bounded properties, constraint density, object references, cross-module references, maintainability findings, lexical-structural use-case coverage evidence, comparison signals, prioritised improvement targets, and composition recommendations. Coverage evidence is not a semantic-equivalence determination. The tool is distributed as the Python package dpawb on PyPI and as a containerised Model Context Protocol server registered as io.github. CE-RISE-software/dpawb. We demonstrate the workflow on a battery Digital Product Passport application by comparing the CE-RISE Digital Passport model ecosystem with the BatteryPass v1.2.0 model ecosystem represented through inferred SHACL proxies. The demonstration shows that CE-RISE provides broader Digital Passport infrastructure and lifecycle coverage, while BatteryPass provides compact battery-sector content. A reviewed alignment retained 14 strict overlap pairs, all present on both sides, and DP-AWB recommended a combined 19-module composition with explicit deduplication review items. The workbench therefore supports transparent model assessment, use-case-driven prioritisation, and integration planning for evolving digital passport ecosystems.

Plain Language Summary

Digital passports are digital records that describe products and materials so that they can be reused, repaired, recycled, or assessed more effectively. The data models behind these passports can become large and difficult to inspect manually. DP-AWB is a software tool that reads SHACL model files and produces reproducible evidence about how large, explicit, connected, and usable a model is. It can also compare two model ecosystems and highlight where they overlap or where a use case is not yet well supported. In this article we describe the tool and demonstrate it by comparing CE-RISE Digital Passport models with BatteryPass models for a battery passport application. The example shows how the tool helps identify complementary strengths and produces integration guidance rather than only a simple score.

Corresponding author
Riccardo Boero
0000-0002-7468-9096
Grant information

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No [101092281] (CE-RISE).

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Copyright
© 2026 Riccardo Boero (Corresponding Author, Co-Author); Miguel Las Heras Hernández (Co-Author) Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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This version addresses the peer-review comments. We added relevant literature and clarified that DP-AWB uses lexical-structural matching, not semantic reasoning or operational DPP evaluation. We documented the BatteryPass-to-SHACL proxy conversion, metric and decision rules, the interpretation of indeterminate findings, and the limits of the demonstration. The conclusion now describes the results as design-time decision evidence.

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Authors & roles

Riccardo Boero

NILU, the Climate and Environmental Research Institute, Kjeller, Akershus, 2027, Norway

Roles
Corresponding Author, Co-Author, Conceptualization, Data Curation, Investigation, Methodology, Software, Validation, Visualization, Writing – Original Draft Preparation, Writing – Review & Editing
0000-0002-7468-9096

Miguel Las Heras Hernández

NILU, the Climate and Environmental Research Institute, Kjeller, Akershus, 2027, Norway

Roles
Co-Author, Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – Review & Editing
0009-0001-1712-7660

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