Open Data for Sustainability Assessment

Sustainability Assessment in the form of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is essential for European research and technology development, SDG-assessment, but existing data is difficult to establish and obsolete quickly.
The ODA project creates and demonstrates the concept for a smart platform for collecting and organizing data in a multidisciplinary collaboration between computer science researchers, sustainability researchers at AAU, and in cooperation with an international network of experts.

Sustainability is increasingly becoming a key aspect of political decision making, commercial positioning, and recently also a key leverage in election campaigning at national and super national democratic processes. This is expected to increase with the global socioeconomic impacts of climate change. Transparent knowledge of “good sustainability performance” is therefore becoming increasingly important for good governance and democratic political processes. Open access to transparent quality data on sustainability is therefore one key parameter for a well-functioning democracy and contributes this way SDG 16. The project is based on an open development platform with international participation and cooperation from individuals from research and industry including, Denmark, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, USA, Norway, and the Netherlands.

The goal of the Open Data for Sustainability Assessment is to maintain an Open Database of data that is useful and vital to perform sustainability assessments. This will allow researchers to perform reliable, transparent and more reproducible assessments. We further aim to provide a infrastructure to foster data integration, interoperability and sharing.

ODA project members have developed (1) a comprehensive ontology for industrial ecology and associated relevant data (see figure); and (2) the Linked Open Data endpoint to aid in aggregating and distributing the collected data. See www.ODAS.aau.dk