Information Integration through Ontology and Metadata for Sustainability Analysis

Indicators of Sustainable Development (ISDs) make up a sophisticated set of information that can be employed as a means to study many aspects of a system’s sustainability. Methods for producing ISDs, as well as environmental models in general, typically are strongly backed by data, so as to heighten their trustworthiness. This work proposes a sustainability analysis framework where higher level forms of data description, namely, a domain ontology and metadata, are employed to harness the data and to provide relevant elicited information to a software tool which is ultimately responsible for yielding levels of sustainability of systems under analysis. Having the framework equipped with a metadata standard and a formal ontology of the domain which are specified in standard and W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) recommended representational formalisms (XML and OWL) fosters information exchange and systems interoperability on the WWW platform.