The UN/SPSC numbering scheme is used as an international way of identifying products using a hierarchical classification schema. This published standard enables uniform classification of products to facilitate electronic commerce supporting international trade and tariffing. RosettaNet has incorporated this numbering scheme in all transactions defined in the partner interface process (PIP) protocol.

The UN/SPSC organization will assign numbers to each level of their hierarchical classification schema, and will match these assigned numbers to the RosettaNet electronic component taxonomy.

Each level of the UN/SPSC hierarchical classification schema contains a two-character numerical value and a textual description. With the exception of the order of the segment level (that can be used to distinguish between products and services), all hierarchies are not significant. The order in the family, class and commodity is not significant and the order of the words in a title does not imply hierarchy or importance. Given below are the levels of the UN/SPSC hierarchical classification schema:

The current UN/SPSC code for a zener diode leaf node is given below as an example:

RosettaNet will be using the UN/SPSC schema to identify branch and leaf nodes with the last two digit pairs. For the RosettaNet EC/active subgroup, the translation to the RosettaNet database nomenclature is given below.

Some rules on number choices when selecting new UN/SPSC numbers:

• The branch node must start at 15 for a new domain
• The leaf node must start at 01 for a new branch/leaf node

Limitations and number ranges on number assignments include the following:

• a choice of 99 numbers are available for all of the RosettaNet domains. UN/SPSC has already assigned the domain numbers.
• RosettaNet also has 85 numbers (00 through 14 are not allowed) for branch nodes for each domain.
• RosettaNet also has 98 numbers (00 cannot be used) for leaf nodes within a branch.