UNSPSC
UNSPSC is the acronym for the United Nations Standard Products and Services Code. UNSPSC is a coding system to classify both products and services for use throughout the global marketplace. The UNSPSC was jointly developed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and Dun & Bradstreet Corporation (D & B) in 1998. The management and development of the UNSPSC Code is coordinated by ECCMA, the Electronic Commerce Code Management Association. The current version consist of more than 16.000 terms.
There is a public version of the code that can be downloaded for free at ECCMA's portal.
An interesting part of UNSPSC is its potential contribution to the Semantic Web, by means of formalizations into ontologies (by OWL and RDF schemas. It can be also related to UDDI, adding new potential to web services.
See also
North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), Standard Industry Code (SIC)