Unambiguous identification of potential business partners is a basic requirement
in eCommerce.
UNIVERSE
® (UNique Identification
and VERification SErvice) is a META registration service for identifiers to
provide world-wide unique identification of business entities like companies,
products and services thereof. It also supports the verification of such entities.
The provider of a
UNIVERSE
® is a Trusted Third Party
for Business Identifiers. This means that it stands for certain quality of a
Business Identifier. By a certified link it redirects the verifiers of such a
Business Identifier transformed into a URL to the directory-entry of the
registered organization.
UNIVERSE
® is a system based upon existing
standards and implementations. It is a "mechanism for global mapping of cyber
identities leveraging on what already exists at the operational level".
UNIVERSE
® is a trusted service for using
registration schemes which fulfill best practice. Like in a Public Key
Infrastructure reliable registration of entities is the linchpin i.e. the
crucial point.
For an overview presentation about
UNIVERSE
®
please click here.
To take advantage of the system as an end-user common browser technology and
Office Software like MS Word are sufficient. No additional software and
training is required.
UNIVERSE
® is designed to provide a unique
lookup of Business Identifiers. It acts as an umbrella for the access of these
Business Identifiers in trusted registers. The system works in a transparent way:
Recognized registers assign Business Identifiers to their registered entities.
Prefixing of these Business Identifiers guarantees world-wide uniqueness.
This is done according to the ISO (International Organization for Standardization)
standard ISO-6523 with so called International Code Designator (ICD) values.
To learn more about ISO-6523 and ICD values,
please click here.
The prefixed identifiers are transformed into a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) to
be looked up on the web. The relevant Internet Standard is RFC 2396 of the IETF
(Internet Engineering Task Force),
please
click here.
The
CEN Workshop Agreement (CWA) 14911
specifies how these two standards (ISO 6523 and RFC 2396) are combined.
UNIVERSE
® is an improved implementation of this CWA.
