Lifecycle
Most descriptions of a product passport stop at publication: import, check, sign, publish. After that, a product is repaired, resold, remanufactured and eventually recycled. Its passport has to stay accurate through all of it, and show different people different parts.
The passport passes through eight stations. Each one below says who works with the record there, and what happens to it.
The stations
Product data arrives the way it already exists: in spreadsheets.
Upload a CSV or Excel file and run a trial first. The node reports what is wrong row by row instead of rejecting the whole file, so nobody has to rebuild their data before they can start.
A product made of parts points to the passports of its parts.
A passport can reference the passports of its components, such as the battery inside a scooter, and the whole chain is verified in one check. A component passport that changed after it was referenced shows up as a break, at the exact point it happened.
Checked against the product group's rules before anything is signed.
Most product groups carry their own set of rules, and they run on your node, inside a sandbox. A new signed version of a group's rules can be installed without restarting the node.
Signed with your own key, on your own servers.
The signature is tied to an identity on a web domain you control, and nothing is sent anywhere to be signed. The record is yours, not held on someone else's platform.
Scan the code, see the public passport. No login, no fee.
The code on the product leads straight to its passport, through GS1 Digital Link. Today that needs a barcode number (a GTIN). From the node's next release, a product can also be identified without a GS1 membership, and its code then opens the passport at the company's own web address.
Each reader sees the part of the record they are entitled to.
The same passport answers a repairer, a recycler and an authority differently, field by field. Access is proven with a credential the reader holds, not by a setting they can change. For batteries the rules are not a simple ladder: an authority and a reader with a legitimate interest each see something the other cannot.
Responsibility changes hands on the record, with the handover signed.
Remanufacturing, repurposing or selling a product line: the outgoing company signs the handover and the node signs its acceptance, so the change of hands is part of the passport rather than an email thread. Either side can decline or withdraw before it completes.
A recorded end of life, and a file anyone can check offline.
The passport, its signatures and its full history export as one signed file. Someone who has never heard of Odal Node can verify it without a network connection and without trusting us.
After the sale
Import, check, sign, publish and resolve give a product its passport. The stations after that keep the passport accurate for the rest of the product's life.
Stations 6, 7, 8 are what keep a record intact through years of repairs and changes of owner, rather than describing a product only on the day it was made:
Status
All eight stations exist in the software today. Nobody is running it in production: no customers, no pilots, no live deployments. The battery passport obligation begins on 18 February 2027, and we would rather be correct when it arrives than early and wrong.
The core library is open source under Apache-2.0, and anyone can read, audit or reuse it.