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Under developmentThe UNVTD project is in development phase and is not yet ready for production implementation. The final approved and implementable standard is expected to be released before the end of December 2026.
ArchitectureDesign Principles

Design principles

Platform and vendor neutral

The United Nations Verifiable Trade Documents project is aimed at enabling the representation and exchange of digital trade documents independently of a particular vendor, wallet, platform, or shared exchange network. See also the Architecture Overview.

Linked Data representation

Trade documents are represented using several Linked Data Vocabularies, including the UN/CEFACT Web Vocabulary , and Schema.org .

W3C Verifiable Credentials Data Model

Additionally, trade documents are wrapped as W3C Verifiable Credentials, enabling their cryptographic verification, while guaranteeing their authenticity and portability. When verifiable trade Documents are exchanged (for instance, via a Business Wallet), they can accelerate digital trade business processes increasing efficiency and trust towards enhanced trade facilitation.

Projections across several trade domains

Trade Documents are projections of fundamental entities involved in different trade domains. For instance a “Bill of Lading” references one or more “Trade Items” from the trade domain and a “Transport Means” from the transport domain (the details of the carrier’s vessel).

Separation of concerns for technical and semantic interoperability

The different trade entities and data projected into each trade document is devised as follows:

  • The fundamental data elements come from the International Chamber of Commerce KTDDE  initiative’s results.

  • The specific data structures and data types are defined via a JSON Schema.

  • The meaning of each member within each JSON Schema is disambiguated through a JSON-LD Context. Such a JSON-LD Context maps each JSON member to a Linked Data term in a Vocabulary. However there could be other equivalent mappings that applications or AI Agents may discover through Linked Data semantic equivalences via skos:exactMatch or owl:sameAs statements.

The Semantic Layers page explains why meanings, document structure and business rules are maintained separately.

Independent assets and seamless cross-domain collaboration and evolution

For each trade document, the main assets (JSON Schema, JSON-LD Context and reference example) are totally independent from the rest and self-contained. This choice enables the assets for each type of trade document to evolve independently, minimising the coordination needs among different domain experts.

Open for extension closed for modification

Issuers may include additional properties beyond those defined by a schema. Receiving systems can process properties they understand and safely ignore extensions they do not. Extensions should use clear names and have meanings anchored in a vocabulary, so they can be understood consistently by systems that support them.

This flexibility does not permit redefining an existing term. Shared properties retain their established meanings across document types and contexts.

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Semantic LayersOverview