School of Business

Building a certification and inspection data infrastructure to promote transparent markets

Document Type

Article

Abstract

This article reports on data architecture that reduces information asymmetries to support public-private collaboration to govern product certification and inspection for promoting transparent markets and building consumer trust. The data architecture is a proof-of-concept set of data standards called the Certification and Inspection Data Infrastructure Building Block (CIDIBB) for data storage, retrieval, sharing and automated reasoning of data that can be used to respond the question: what constitutes a trustworthy certification and inspection process? CIDIBB consists of three interrelated ontologies, focusing specifically on certified fair-trade coffee that has the potential to become universally applicable to any certification and inspection process for products or services. The evaluation results suggest that CIDIBB is able to test the trustworthiness of certification schemes, providing consistent results. CIDIBB will contribute to support public-private collaboration to solve public problems such as the promotion of sustainable production and fair labor practices.

Publication Title

International Journal of Electronic Government Research

Publication Date

2017

Volume

13

Issue

4

First Page

53

Last Page

75

ISSN

1548-3886

DOI

10.4018/IJEGR.2017100104

Keywords

building block, certification, data infrastructure, inspection, ontology, sustainable production, virtual certificates

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