=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1747/IT202_ICBO2016
|storemode=property
|title=Sustainable Development Goals Interface Ontology
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1747/IT202_ICBO2016.pdf
|volume=Vol-1747
|authors=Mark Jensen
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/icbo/Jensen16a
}}
==Sustainable Development Goals Interface Ontology ==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1747/IT202_ICBO2016.pdf
Sustainable Development Goals Interface Ontology
Mark Jensen
University at Buffalo
Buffalo, NY, USA
mpjensen@buffalo.edu
Note: This abstract is for a 15-minute talk during the plenary session on Semantics for Sustainability.
Keywords—Ontology, Integration, Doctrine, UN Sustainable
Development Goals, SDGIO, Monitoring, OBO Foundry
I. INTRODUCTION
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.
II. SEMANTICS FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT Table 1. Sustainable Development Goal 6, its eight Targets and ten Indicators.
The United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP)
has commissioned the development of the Sustainable of definitions for terms appearing across multiple sources from
Development Goals Interface Ontology (SDGIO) for use in diverse agencies within such a large heterogeneous agency as
their knowledge discovery platform UNEPLive [5]. The UN’s the UN, integration of existing semantic resources,
Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) initiative prescribes 17 coordination the insolvent of domain specialists, and fostering
broadly thematic goals for transformative global change [6]. the development of new ontologies in under-represented
Each goal prescribes a set of target endpoints for development domains.
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 III. ONTOLOGY
compute the indicators cuts across the three pillars of In my talk I will describe the development cycle and build
sustainability: Social, Economic and Environment [7]. process of SDGIO, how we are addressing these problems of
Integration of data and enhancing access to knowledge from integration, as well as the ontology’s high level structure and
these three domains is a key goal of the SDG process [8]. its implementation in UNEPs knowledge repository. I will
Doing so requires addressing several key problems: ambiguity include examples of how were are modeling key social
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