ETIM 10.0 — the classification model

The design decision inside this primitive is that we did not build our own taxonomy. ETIM 10.0 is the classification model the EU electrical-wholesale supply chain already runs on; authoring a competing one would have taken years and produced a vocabulary nobody else spoke. Licensing ETIM under Open Data Commons Attribution 1.0 let us model 5,640 classes and 76,625 feature mappings once, at services/runtime/lib/etim-model.mjs — every distributor’s PIM speaks the same language as our runtime, and every incoming product carries a class we can already reason about.

The single largest data asset in unbin’s runtime was not one we authored — it was the ETIM classification model, licensed and integrated. ETIM 10.0 defines 5,640 classes and 76,625 feature mappings across the European electrical-product supply chain. If your product is an electrical component sold into the EU via a distributor of any scale, it almost certainly has an ETIM class and a fingerprint of ETIM feature values attached to it in your distributor’s PIM.

We modelled the ETIM structure in services/runtime/lib/etim-model.mjs — class hierarchy, feature-value tables, translation layer between the ETIM identifiers and the internal representation the fusion + calibration + self-verify layers consume. The reason to hold this as a first-class primitive is straightforward: the moment a product enters the runtime with an ETIM class attached, we know a very large number of things about what fields the product should have, what units those fields should be in, and what ranges of values are plausible. That is a lot of prior information for the calibration monitor to work with, and a lot of scaffolding for the fusion layer to fall back on when the fetched-source layer is quiet.

We did not attempt to re-invent the taxonomy or to build a “smarter” one. There is no smarter classification of European electrical components than the one the electrical industry itself maintains. There are alternative taxonomies (UNSPSC, eCl@ss) with overlapping scope; ETIM won for the specific market unbin targets because the supplier PIMs already speak it.

Attribution, per the licence: ETIM International, Open Data Commons Attribution Licence v1.0. The counts cited above (5,640 classes, 76,625 feature mappings) are facts about the database, republished under the Attribution clause of ODC-BY 1.0. The classification content itself is not republished here — we do not publish taxonomy content in these notes, only the shape of the integration.

The lesson we took from integrating ETIM: pick the industry vocabulary that already exists over inventing your own. The gain from having the whole supply chain speak your vocabulary is compounding; the gain from having a marginally better vocabulary that only you speak is negative.

The composable primitives are the code. The standard is the licence.