Customs and Border Protection integrating supply chain data following startup exchange testing

Real-time, standards-based tests for exchanging supply chain data from three U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) collaborating startups have opened the door for Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) to begin integrating data from them and their customers.

Companies mesur.io, Neoflow and Transmute exchanged supply chain data with CBP, as part of the Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) Silicon Valley Innovation Program’s (SVIP) Preventing Forgery & Counterfeiting of Certificates and Licenses topic call. That call had sought companies to push technologies for World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Verifiable Credential Data Model (VCDM), Linked Data (JSON-LD) and W3C Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) standards, as a way to improve global interoperability, traceability, security and automation of international trade.

“This real-time testing with CBP demonstrated the maturity of the standards, the commercial readiness of the startup’s technology platforms and their ability to support CBP’s trade modernization efforts,” Melissa Oh, SVIP managing director, said.

Testing followed three years of work undertaken in collaboration with CBP and SVIP. Together, they developed and implemented global standards and contributed to the creation and definition W3C Credential Community Group (CCG) traceability vocabularies and set up open, royalty-free, free-to-use application programming interfaces (APIs).

That said, each company focused on a different area, more tailored to their expertise. Mesur.io concentrated on agriculture and food safety, Neoflow targeted oil and natural gas, and Transmute tackled steel and e-commerce.