ECO: The Earthster Core Ontology

The Earthster Core Ontology (ECO) is a core domain ontology for Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), a discipline for assessing the social and environmental impact of products.  ECO was developed as part of the Earthster project to facilitate the open publication and sharing of LCA data on the web and the private sharing of information between different organisations in a supply chain.

ECO uses the Web Ontology Language (OWL) to name and describe the core concepts of the domain of LCA and the relationships between them. It represents the conceptual common ground between a number of incompatible competing tools and sources of impact assessment data.
Using concepts defined in ECO is possible to represent:

• the quantative flow of products through a supply chain
• aggregate  models which treat a whole supply chain or a part of a supply chain as a single aggregate process
• the social and environmental effects of each process including
  • resource consumption
  • emissions to different parts of the ecosphere
  • other effects on the environment such as deforestration, bringing wild land under agriculture, transforming agricultural land into urban environments, etc
  • provision of wages, education and healthcare to workers
• methods for estimating the total impact of a supply chain on key factors such as human health, global warming and ecosystem diversity.
• metadata about the data such as who produced it, when it was created, who validated it etc.

Data from competing incompatible tools and databases can be transformed to a common representation using the terms described in ECO.  This provides a foundation for a common language and vocabulary for publishing and exchanging LCA data.