An xChange is gonna come… official ETIM xChange release plan available now!
Nieuwsberichten

An xChange is gonna come… official ETIM xChange release plan available now!

By December 1, 2023No Comments

An xChange is gonna come… official ETIM xChange release plan available now!

December 1, 2023

It took almost three years, but finally we have the finish line in sight. ETIM xChange is long awaited and will see the light of day in the first quarter of 2024. The project has come to a stage where the releaseplan can be shared with the public.

The release plan

With the first draft coming to a final state, the project team will work on finishing the documentation just before the end of this year. The month of January will be used to launch the very first bèta version of ETIM xChange to give the community a chance to find any last-minute bugfixes.

The official release date for ETIM xChange version 1.0 is set for 19-2-2024.

The ETIM International team en ETIM board is excited about this upcoming historical milestone. When this ship leaves the harbor we have high hopes for contributing to the global standardisation of product data exchange within all technical sectors.

The key take-aways for ETIM xChange:

  • It is the first ever product data exchange standard that is fully controlled by ETIM International and its community, with a focus for global use.
  • It is based on the European Master Data Guidelines, but the project team has also taken into consideration other known product data exchange standards. (DICO, BMEcat, FAB-DIS).
  • It uses GS1 standards for identification of items (GTIN) and locations (GLN).
  • The exchange format is JSON based, including a JSON schema for validation.
  • The documentation provides a comprehensive semantic description of all datafields.

Cool features in this first ETIM xChange release:

  • Simplified structure in JSON which is logically grouped, based on multiple national exchange standards.
  • Generic product data is separated from the data of one or more trade items of that product.
  • Data structure for transporting LCA data in all phases of the life cycle.
  • The structure allows all kinds of multilingual or single-language attachments.
  • It is compatible with latest ETIM-MC structures, including Connection Types.
  • It has a very flexible structure for all kinds of methods for exchanging packaging-hierarchy data.

Related (older) articles on the ETIM xChange project:

More efficient Master Data exchange and better data quality? We are working on it!

The ETIM data exchange project– an update on our steps toward a new format