The Digital Container Shipping Association is a neutral, non-profit body founded by the largest ocean container carriers to publish common technical standards for container shipping — track and trace, booking, the electronic bill of lading, and operational vessel schedules — as open API specifications.
DCSA
The Digital Container Shipping Association (DCSA) is the standards body the container-shipping lines set up between themselves, on the correct premise that a shipper integrating with seven carriers should not have to write seven integrations. It publishes its specifications openly, as OpenAPI documents on GitHub, which puts it ahead of most industry bodies on distribution alone.
- Track and Trace - A common event model for where a container is and what has happened to it.
- Booking and shipment - Standardized booking request, confirmation and amendment flows.
- Electronic Bill of Lading - The eBL standards that make a digital title document interoperable between carriers and banks, alongside the MLETR legal groundwork.
- Operational vessel schedules - Common schedule and port-call data.
- Published as contracts - Specifications live in public repositories rather than behind a member portal.
DCSA is the sharpest specimen of the gap between signing a standard and shipping it. The State of Supply Chain APIs scored the member carriers directly: one publishes a machine-readable contract worth calling, and six return agent-readiness of exactly 0.0. The standard is not the constraint here — it exists, it is free, and it is well made. What is missing is any commercial or regulatory pressure on a carrier to expose it, which is the same pattern CAMARA shows in telecommunications and the reason both are worth watching as leading indicators rather than as achievements.
Referenced in API Evangelist papers
This standard shows up in my published research. These reports read the machine-readable evidence provider by provider — and put this standard in the context of a real sector.
The State of Supply Chain APIs
Ocean freight's CAMARA: member carriers control the majority of global container capacity, publish a common standard, and one of them ships a callable contract — the other six return agent-readiness of 0.0.
