Due to climate change and the Earth overshoot day, that is becoming earlier every year, it is getting more important to use renewable resources and, in particular, biogenic waste and residues instead of fossil resources. There is currently no general scheme to characterise diferent biogenic wastes and residues and their according legal regulations. We intend to create an ontology that contains all information necessary to (i) clearly identify biomasses and (ii) to enable dealing with it in a bioeconomic and industrial context, which is why the ontology shall be shared with researchers, industry and policy makers. Since this is an early stage work, we want to start with 77 residues from the DBFZ Resource Database developed at the DBFZ Leipzig, Germany.
according to the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture [
And the afords for sustainable practices are necessary since, according to Lin and Wackernagel [
The production of all goods we need and use (primary production, e.g. food, technical devices,
energy) and our every day life (e.g. eating, showering) are resulting in a huge amount of waste [
To reuse residues, many things have to be considered. Some residues as reclaimed wood or green
cutting from the roadside can have a high concentration of heavy metals and thus their recycling is
limited. The European Union (EU) passed many guidelines, regulations and laws about how to treat
residues [
A farmer might wonder, who could be interested in the leafs of their sugar beets or in the liquid manure of their cattle. With more knowledge about the characteristics of their residues and related regulations and laws, producers could make advantageous ofers. On the other hand, there might be a
CEUR
ceur-ws.org start-up team that is looking for residues to produce more sustainable soles for their new hiking shoes without any clue what could be suitable. Due to the huge amount of diferent regulations and residues, it is hard for all concerned to get an overview, which residues would be suitable for certain production, how much amount is available, and what is the legal framework. Additionally, there is not yet a central contact point to get this information.
Being aware of so many issues and questions regarding the availability and use of residues, we want
to create an ontology that can help diferent stakeholders to answer their questions. This ontology
shall include some of the most applicable guidelines, regulations and laws from EU and Germany for
the classification of residues [
Until now, this is an early stage work and we are building up a first ontology including only residues
from the bioeconomy in Germany. This ontology will include the information from our DBFZ Resource
Database (https://datalab.dbfz.de/resdb), which was developed by Naegeli de Torres et al. [
In this section we describe briefly what an ontology is and how we will create our ontology for classifying residues from the bioeconomy. Additionally, we introduce the Resource Database as the base for the ifrst stage of our ontology.
An ontology in the sense of computer science is a formal way to represent knowledge. Domain-specific terms and concepts (called classes) are connected to each other (connections are called relations) and thus portray a part of the real world. An ontology should be machine readable and understandable. This makes them usable for web applications and online search, but also for Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Creating such an ontology is an iterative process and there is never only one correct ontology about on topic [11]. According to Noy and McGuinness [11], the following steps should be considered before starting programming and can be used as a red thread during the genesis of the ontology. However, they can and will be adapted over time.
1. Localize the domain of the ontology and its aim: What is it about and who will use it? What questions shall be answered with the ontology? 2. Reuse existing ontologies: Is there anything suitable already prepared? 3. List necessary terms for classes and relations. 4. Define useful classes and order them in a hierarchy. 5. Define properties of the classes. 6. Define restrictions of the properties (boundaries). 7. Create instances (real world individuals).
Following this recommendation, according to step 1, we defined the bioeconomy as domain of our ontology1 and everybody ofering or requiring residues as target group. The aim is to designate all residues that are available in Germany. The questions, that the ontology shall answer (also called competency questions) are e.g.: How many residues result from the cultivation of leguminous plants? What kind of faeces result from diferent farming methods of cattle? Can I make bio-plastics from apple pomace? What residue is available for the sole of recyclable hiking shoes? 1As already mentioned above, the ontology shall increase over time. We start with a first and small version focusing on the residues from the DBFZ Resource Database. This is what we mean by “our ontology” in the following.
Following step 2, we found an interesting ontology about bioeconomy called BiOnto [12], which
has a broad range of information. Unfortunately it does not ofer enough details for our use case,
though it is very comprehensive. The BiOnto ontology was not made for a classification of residues,
but for an overview of important terms and stakeholders in the topic of the bioeconomy. Maybe
some parts of it can be useful in a later stage of our ontology. Instead of using existing ontologies,
we focused on regulations as a base, since this is very important for following processing steps of
residues. In addition, some questions regarding a taxonomy for residues are already answered with
these regulations. The most important regulations are the Waste Catalogue Regulation Federal Ministry
for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety [
Some of the necessary terms are e.g. agriculture, forestry, industry, plant-based, animal-based, manure, slurry, leafs, roots, sugar beet, dairy cow, porker, apple pomace, tobacco, reclaimed wood, sludge, biomass, heating value, silicon concentration, etc. The usage of these terms for steps 4 to 6 is still work in progress.
To create the ontology, we use Protégé [15], which is an open source ontology editor from Stanford University. A first glance of the hierarchy is given in Fig. 1. The general design of the ontology can be described as a combination of several taxonomies taken from regulations and guidelines from the EU and Germany, in which a lot of characteristics of residue groups and individuals are included.
The DBFZ Resource Database considers diferent types of national biomass potentials (e.g., theoretical
or technical biomass potential) for Germany. It currently contains information on 77 biogenic wastes
and residues [
We want to create a simple way to share information about residues and answer questions about their usage and characteristics. For a high generalization of all this information, we will comply with several national and European regulations and work together with experts from the bioeconomy. Thus we will develop a tool that can be used by farmers, industry but also researchers and policy makers.
As soon as the ontology has reached a stage where enough information is included, we will activate our contacts to diferent players in the bioeconomy to evaluate our afords and to get more insights, which characteristics are additionally desired. With this already existing network we will bring our work in use later.
In the beginning we will focus on DBFZ Resource Database and its biomasses that are of interest in the bioeconomy. However, we plan to increase the ontology to all residues and renewable resources available in Germany and maybe even Europe. For a more comfortable usage of this ontology we plan to connect it with a Large Language Model (LLM) that answers questions from users directly on the base of the ontology.
LLMs and AI are planned to help maintaining the validity of the ontology. Since regulations keep on changing over the years, this will be an important issue. However, in this stage of the work, in is not the main focus of our activities.
Since this is an early stage work and the ontology is not yet finished, and thus neither well evaluated nor published. However, it is planned to publish the ontology following the FAIR principles.
AI experts from KIDA were involved in the preparation of this paper. KIDA is supported by funds of the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL) based on a decision of the Parliament of the Federal Republic of Germany via the Federal Ofice for Agriculture and Food (BLE). [10] M. Dotzauer, K. S. Radtke, M. Jordan, D. Thrän, Advanced SQL-Database for bioenergy technologies - A catalogue for bio-resources, conversion technologies, energy carriers, and supply applications, Heliyon 10 (2024) e25434. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e25434. [11] N. F. Noy, D. L. McGuinness, Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology, Technical Report, Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory, 2001. URL: http://www.ksl.stanford. edu/people/dlm/papers/ontology-tutorial-noy-mcguinness-abstract.html. [12] N. Biancone, C. Bicchielli, P. Grifoni, F. Ferri, BiOnto Ontology, 2021. doi:10.5281/zenodo.
5589773. [13] European Parliament, Council of the European Union, Directive (EU) 2018/2001 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 December 2018 on the promotion of the use of energy from renewable sources (recast), 2018. [14] Technischen Komitee ISO/TC 238, Technischen Komitee CEN/TC 335, DIN EN ISO 17225-1:2021-10 (Biogene Festbrennstofe - Brennstofspezifikationen und -klassen - Teil 1: Allgemeine Anforderungen), 2021. [15] M. A. Musen, The protégé project: a look back and a look forward, AI Matters 1 (2015) 4–12.
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