The sustainability reporting of small and medium-sized enterprises is gaining significance, as their business partners often rely on them to ensure compliance and promote sustainability along the supply chain. However, the implementation of reporting remains challenging, as companies may lack the appropriate human resources to comprehend the informal textual descriptions from various reporting standards. In order to support the sustainability reporting of the companies, we present our ongoing work on the OntoSustain ontology. OntoSustain models sustainability domain knowledge, and ofers good comprehensibility, transparency, and reusability for companies' sustainability oficers in data collection and indicator value derivation.
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The significance of sustainability reporting for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)
should not be overlooked, as buying firms may rely on them to enforce sustainability
standards [
Ontologies can serve as an approach to model complex application domains, addressing
ambiguity in natural language [
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association and composition relationships among sustainability aspects and indicators. Both [
We present our ongoing work on OntoSustain, an ontology that helps SMEs prepare compliant sustainability reporting. This paper provides an overview of the ontology, encompassing the ontology engineering process, the ontology schema, as well as the use cases of the ontology.
The aim of OntoSustain is to represent knowledge about the underlying business activities, the
calculation, and the derivation method of sustainability indicators in the context of the corporate
sustainability reporting application. Following the METHONTOLOGY [
Ontology specification The identified ontology scope covers sustainability indicators from reporting standards. We chose GRI1, the most widely used sustainability reporting framework around the world, and the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS)2, a core component of the sustainability reporting landscape within the European Union. Both frameworks categorize the indicators under sustainability aspects, such as emissions, workforce, and corrup
2https://www.efrag.org/lab6 tion, in accordance with the environmental, social, and governance dimensions. To delimit the scope of OntoSustain and to represent the ontology requirements, we formulated competency questions (CQs). Presented below are two examples:
CQ 1. Which business activities could have impacts on a specific sustainability indicator? CQ 2. Can the value of a specific ESRS indicator be mathematically derived from any GRI indicator(s)? If not, which other data is needed for the conversion?
Ontology design OntoSustain consists of three modules: 1) sustainability information
system ontology (SISO), 2) sustainability reporting standards ontology (SRSO), and 3) sustainability
calculation system ontology (SCSO). In Figure 1, we present the modules along with their
respective main classes and properties, as well as the utilized existing ontologies, such as the
QUDT Ontologies3, and the KPIOnto ontology[
SISO models two aspects: a company’s daily business activities and sustainability domain knowledge. We adopted the class- and property hierarchy, and the domain and range descriptions to semantically diferentiate sustainability indicators, e.g., properties emitsS1 and emitsS2 are both sub-properties of emits, but we define distinct domains for them to distinguish between the scope 1 and scope 2 GHG emissions4.
Listing 1: Excerpt of a core indicator individual with an associated SPARQL query that is parametrized and used for indicator value derivation (prefix definitions are omitted) srso:CI0014 a srso:CoreIndicator ; srso:hasQueryText ”SELECT (SUM(?value) AS ?PurchasedElectricityConsumption) ?unit WHERE { VALUES (?organization) {
(siso:Org1) # PARAMETER } ?organization siso:owns ?asset . ?asset a siso:Asset ; siso:consumesPurchasedElectricity ?electricity . ?electricity siso:hasMeasurement ?measurement .
?measurement siso:hasNumericalValue ?value ; siso:hasUnit ?unit .
} GROUP BY ?unit” .
SRSO models sustainability indicators and provides the value conversion based on the indicator requirements. The indicator metadata such as name, ID, and description is also modeled (StandardIndicator (SI)). We acknowledge that a simple ”same-as” relation is insuficient to achieve complete interoperability among diverse standards, as indicators from diferent standards may difer in their required measurement unit or disaggregation level. As an example, GRI mandates reporting the consumption of purchased energy in units of ”joules, watt-hours, or multiples” while ESRS specifies reporting in megawatt-hours and requires an additional breakdown of the quantity between renewable and non-renewable sources. Therefore, the atomic indicators are derived and modeled using CoreIndicator (CI). Distinct CIs specific to each standard only associate with their respective SIs, whereas shared CIs associate with multiple SIs, facilitating interoperability among diverse standards.
SCSO is designed to derive indicator values by linking SISO and SRSO. The values of CIs
are calculated using pre-stored SPARQL query templates, from which the reporting values (ReportingValue) of associated SIs are then evaluated. The core indicator specification in Listing 1 shows how the SISO model can be used to calculate SRSO reporting values. Thereby, the assessment of individual indicator values can be achieved independently for diferent timeframes and without impacting the metadata of SISO and SRSO.
Ontology implementation We use the Protégé ontology editor5 for the OWL-based formalization of terminological knowledge. GraphDB6 serves as a database for persistently storing and visualizing terminological and related assertional organizational data.
Figure 2 illustrates the interaction pipeline between OntoSustain and its stakeholders. OntoSustain is developed by the ontology engineer and used by sustainability oficers for three use cases: 1) managing sustainability data, 2) inquiring indicator values, and 3) converting the values across multiple standards. Sustainability oficers will use a graphical user interface in their daily work: they input and update their organization’s business activities, as well as enter sustainability data within specific time periods. When there’s a need to generate sustainability reports, they inquire about reporting information. Additionally, they can translate the reporting information between multiple standards, if needed. Using the ontology ofers the advantage of ensuring consistent indicator calculation procedures for the same organization across diferent time periods and even enables comparability among multiple organizations.
This paper presents ongoing work on OntoSustain, which aims to ofer good comprehensibility, transparency, and reusability in sustainability data collection and indicator value calculation, derivation, and conversion. OntoSustain will facilitate organizations in achieving cost-eficient
6https://graphdb.ontotext.com/
sustainability reporting practices. In the future, we plan to conduct an ontology evaluation
using data from a manufacturing SME to assess the problem of the three Cs[
The authors acknowledge the financial support by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany in the project DiProLeA (project number 02J19B122).