Note: This abstract is for a 15-minute talk during the plenary session on Semantics for Sustainability. Ontologies are built in a variety of circumstances, for different applications. Some are quite small and built with minimal consideration (or need) for extensibility. Others, such as many of the large-scale efforts in the OBO Foundry, have a team of developers, domain specialists and collaborators actively engaged in interactive development [1-2]. The size of the ontology, or the complexity of the domain, aren't necessarily indicators of the development methodology and to what extent efforts are made to integrate the ontology with existing ontologies or other semantic resources. The use of ontologies by large organizations and government agencies is growing. For example, the Common Core ontologies by the US Army, the Joint Doctrine ontology, Untied States Geological Survey [3-4]. Within the context of integrating ontologies with sizable agencies, problems arise over harmonizing current vocabularies, agency doctrine and standards, while still attempting to build a useful tool that still adheres to best practice in developing modular and extensible realism-based ontologies.
The United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) has commissioned the development of the Sustainable Development Goals Interface Ontology (SDGIO) for use in their knowledge discovery platform UNEPLive [5]. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) initiative prescribes 17 broadly thematic goals for transformative global change [6]. Each goal prescribes a set of target endpoints for development processes within individual nation member states. See Table 1 for an example of one Goal and its Targets. In addition, a set of indicators have been adopted to facilitate the monitoring of progress towards reaching these targets. The data needed to compute the indicators cuts across the three pillars of sustainability: Social, Economic and Environment [7]. Integration of data and enhancing access to knowledge from these three domains is a key goal of the SDG process [8]. Doing so requires addressing several key problems: ambiguity of definitions for terms appearing across multiple sources from diverse agencies within such a large heterogeneous agency as the UN, integration of existing semantic resources, coordination the insolvent of domain specialists, and fostering the development of new ontologies in under-represented domains.
In my talk I will describe the development cycle and build process of SDGIO, how we are addressing these problems of integration, as well as the ontology’s high level structure and its implementation in UNEPs knowledge repository. I will include examples of how were are modeling key social phenomena, such as access to basic services, or safely treated water. For example, see Figure 1 for an illustration of how we model the Goals, Targets and Indicators in SDGIO.
sometimes vague and ambiguous definitions found in existing UN vocabularies when incorporating these in SDGIO classes. In doing so we have encountered a need to maintain connection to established resources allowing for reuse of existing metadata, thus building on established sets of semantic resources, while still adhering to best practices in ontology development. In this sense, while the content of the ontology should derive from a strong need to represent current scientific understanding of the domains invloved, the dissemination and implementation of the ontology itself as a tool (a representational artifact) has to respect user needs.
[2] http://obofoundry.org/ [4] JM Powers, KD Shapiro, and DS Monk (2014) “Information Exchange and Fusion in a Collaborative Environment using Semantic Information Requirements”, International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CTS 2014), 597-601. [5] “The Sustainable Development Goals Interface Ontology (SDGIO)”, https://github.com/SDG-InterfaceOntology/sdgio [6] United Nations (2015) “Transforming our world: the 2030 agenda for sustainable development.” p. A/RES/70/1. [7] United Nations Environmental Programme (2015) “UNEP Post 2015 Note #1: Integrating the three dimensions of sustainable development”, http://www.unep.org/unea1/docs/UNEP%20Post%202015%20Note%20 1%20final.pdf