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Managing Product Conformity at Scale with Semantic Knowledge Graph

Sika is using taxonomies, ontologies, and a semantic knowledge graph to manage product conformity assessment across hundreds of product lines, multiple regulatory verticals in more than 100 countries. In this way, it has replaced fragmented, manual processes with a scalable, harmonized data infrastructure.

The Client

A global specialty chemicals company developing products for sealing, bonding, damping, reinforcing, and other performance-critical applications in construction, infrastructure, and industrial sectors. 

The Challenge

Sika's conformity assessment process spans multiple regulatory verticals — construction, automotive, infrastructure — each with distinct and evolving rules, resulting in fragmented manual processes.  

The Solution

Sika has built a semantic knowledge graph on ontologies and controlled vocabularies to map regulatory requirements, internal processes, and product data in a unified, scalable layer. A harmonized metadata layer distributed across existing data silos enables governance and interoperability without disrupting the day-to-day operations of hundreds of business teams.

Technical capabilities

  • A semantic representation of regulatory requirements using taxonomies and controlled vocabularies, mapped through ontologies to internal processes, actors, and product data across all applicable verticals and regions
  • A virtualized knowledge graph integrating multiple internal data silos via a unified, centrally governed metadata layer. This enables scalable, legally traceable conformity assessment without changes to source systems

Business outcomes

  • Scalable conformity assessment across a complex, multi-vertical, multi-regional product portfolio — reducing dependency on manual, siloed processes
  • A solid semantic foundation ready to support future automation, AI-assisted assessment, and knowledge consolidation for regulatory conformity

The Challenge

Sika’s Global Product Conformity team is responsible for assessing the conformity of every product the company places on the market against all applicable binding obligations — regulatory, statutory, contractual, or voluntary. In principle, the process is straightforward: identify the rules, gather the evidence, issue a declaration. In practice, it has become one of the company’s most complex operational challenges.

The core difficulty is how to scale combined with regulatory fragmentation. Active in more than 100 countries and multiple verticals, Sika must navigate sector-specific regulations that differ by application type, geography and use context. The same product placed in two locations can fall under entirely different regulatory frameworks depending on the specific infrastructure, end use, or national jurisdiction involved.

This has intensified with the addition of horizontal EU regulations such as the Design for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) and the Construction Product Regulation (CPR). It layers new obligations on top of all existing sector-specific requirements and mandates digital declaration via a Digital Product Passport. The result is a product of regulatory requirements that grows exponentially as products, regions, and verticals multiply. All of which made the manual, fragmented approach unsustainable.

The Solution

To address the complexity at its root, Sika’s Digital Product Conformity team has built a semantic knowledge graph infrastructure. It consolidates, connects and makes queryable the regulatory and product knowledge scattered across the company.

The approach begins with a semantic representation of regulatory requirements — using taxonomies and controlled vocabularies to capture obligations at the precision needed for assessment. These models are connected through ontologies that map internal processes and data sources, providing a semantic layer that bridges siloed systems without requiring their modification. Rather than enforcing data quality changes at source, the team has implemented a harmonized metadata layer distributed across existing sources. This allows the company to apply governance and semantic consistency centrally while leaving operational systems intact.

The result is a virtualized knowledge graph that supports conformity assessment across thousands of products. This provides a connected view of regulatory requirements, internal evidence, and product data. Every declaration issued carries legal weight and the system is designed to ensure all aspects are checked in a verifiable, traceable way.

The Impact

“The most important feature for me is the knowledge consolidation, because that’s just by the history and nature of the company has grown over time. It’s the biggest pain for me.”

Thierry Berset, Head of Global Product Conformity At Sika

Sika is at an early but critical stage of building the semantic infrastructure needed to manage product conformity at scale. The knowledge graph approach is already delivering a key benefit: consolidating regulatory knowledge and internal evidence into a single connected layer. This helps reduce the fragmentation that has historically made assessment slow and resource-intensive.The harmonized metadata layer — applied across existing systems without operational disruption — provides a governance model that scales across hundreds of business teams. As the semantic base matures, it will support Sika’s broader conformity roadmap: Construction product regulation  obligations under EU regulatory framework and automated assessment checks that progressively reduce manual workload.

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Facing Similar Challenges?

Struggling to manage product conformity assessment across dozens of regulatory frameworks, markets, and verticals while keeping up with new horizontal mandates?

Whether you are a global manufacturer, specialty chemicals company, or construction products supplier, Graphwise can help you:

  • Build a semantic representation of regulatory requirements across all applicable verticals and regions to provide a structured, queryable knowledge layer
  • Connect internal data silos through a harmonized, centrally governed metadata layer — without disrupting existing systems or operational teams
  • Scale conformity assessment across thousands of products with full legal traceability and verifiable, auditable declarations
  • Lay the foundation for knowledge consolidation necessary for Digital Product Passport compliance and future AI-assisted regulatory automation

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