A beginners guide to EPCIS for the supply chain industry

Start from the record, not the buzzword. An EPCIS 2.0 event is a validated, hashed, appended fact, and epcis.dev is a capture gateway that enforces exactly that: GS1's own schema at the door, the capturing account stamped — capturedBy, the warrantor, kept distinct from who, the attested observer — the CBV 2.0 hash as the event's identity, and no way to un-write. The topic above is read against that record.

Start with the model. An EPCIS 2.0 event answers five questions about one observed moment: what objects were seen, when, where, why (the business step and disposition, drawn from the CBV — the Core Business Vocabulary), and how (sensor data, where instruments were involved). Events are captured over one standard interface, queried over another, and identified by the CBV 2.0 §8.9 hash of their own content. That is the whole standard in one paragraph; almost everything else is vocabulary, and the CBV is that vocabulary.

Reads are minimally scoped. You see your own scope; what is outside it is absent, not greyed out and not redacted, so there is no shape left behind to argue about. Recording an event is $0 by policy — intent, until published terms bind it — because a stream that charges per event is one you stop feeding the month the bill grows with volume.

Identity is the standard's own. The gateway computes the standardized EPCIS event hash from CBV 2.0 §8.9, with GS1 Digital Link normalization, checked against pinned reference vectors, so the same event captured twice is the same event and a changed event is a different one.

Provenance: an aged epcis.dev page, kept at its original URL and refreshed into the current design on 7 August 2026.

Proof, not adjectives. The gateway's conformance tests pass against GS1's normative artifacts, and the calculators answer on this origin — POST /translate, /validate, /hash, no key. The dated ledger is What ships today.