Product and service classifications

Product and service classifications are hierarchical structures to find a class for a product or service or to find the products in a class with certain data properties.

Product classifications have various uses:

• Finding unique trade marks within a product class in order to avoid conflicts in the future from same business or product name within the same class so that there is risk of confusion by consumer or procurer.
• Finding products matching consumer given criteria

In Consumerium parlance basically what Lowest Troll used to call Product Groups.

Current classifications

Open Food Facts taxonomy

Open Food Facts has a taxonomy for food products. What about Open Beauty Facts and Open Product Facts?

Nice Classification

Work on the Nice Classification was initiated in 1957, in w:Nice, France, hence the name.

Today it is maintained and developed by the World Intellectual Property Organization.

Access the Nice database at wipo.int

NCL appears to be the abbreviation in industry parlance.

Read more in Wikipedia

• w:International (Nice) Classification of Goods and Services

UNSPSC

“The United Nations Standard Products and Services Code (UNSPSC) is a taxonomy of products and services for use in eCommerce. It is a four-level hierarchy coded as an eight-digit number, with an optional fifth level adding two more digits.”

~ Wikipedia on What is the UNSPSC?

“The four primary levels of the code are: Segment, Family, Class and Commodity. Each level is coded in two decimal digits, with '00' treated specially to give segments, families and classes their own eight-digit codes.”

~ Wikipedia on How is the UNSPSC structured?

The UNSPSC has a theoretical address space of slightly under 100 million unique "commodity" ids as follows:

1. Segment: 99 possiblities
   1. Family 99*99 possiblilities (9,801)
      1. Class 99^3 possibilities (970,299)
         1. Commodity 99^4 possibilities (96,059,601)

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Product classification schemes that cannot be found anymore

EURONICE

EURONICE was a 13+ language Nice compliant database by the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM). In 2016 OHIM was named it to EUIPO.

Surely the database didn't go to /dev/null.

Global Product Classification

Global Product Classification was a product classification system developed by EAN.UCC in partnership with w:ACNielsen and w:Global Commerce Initiative. Initial version was published in 2003. Global Product Classification Task Group]] GPCTG is in charge of development of this classification scheme.

1. This product classification is available for browsing for free as PDF documents.
2. Excel and XML formats are available for a fee
3. Third parties can offer access to the GPC in PDF format. Other format (apparently including Wiki are restricted and defined in the third party licensee's agreement.

• Historical note from September 2020: A Google search for "Global Product Classification" gives 24,100 hits on 20:20, 22 Sep 2020
• Historical note from May 2005: A Google search for "Global Product Classification" gives only 349 hits on 12:20, 17 May 2005 (GMT)