Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is the study of the environmental impact of products taking into account their entire life-span and production chain. This requires gathering data from a variety of heterogeneous sources into a Life Cycle Inventory (LCI). LCI preparation involves the integration of observations and engineering models with reference data and literature results from around the world, from different domains, and at varying levels of granularity. Existing LCA data formats only address syntactic interoperability, thereby often ignoring semantics. This leads to inefficiencies in information collection and management and thus a variety of challenges, e.g., difficulties in reproducing assessments published in the literature. In this work, we present an ontology pattern that specifies key aspects of LCA/LCI data models, i.e., the notions of flows, activities, agents, and products, as well as their properties.
The pattern provides a common semantic core for describing key LCI concepts: flows, activities, agents and products, along with how they relate. It supports questions such as whether a flow is a reference product, where an activity takes place, and which environmental compartment contains an elementary flow. In the paper’s coal-power example, coal is an input flow, electricity is the reference product, and carbon dioxide is an elementary output flow linked to the generating activity and its location.
Rather than replacing existing data formats, the pattern is intended to improve semantic interoperability between data models, specifications and software. The authors limit its scope: it does not describe the complete LCA process or define system boundaries and detailed spatial, temporal or thematic scope. Those aspects can be aligned with complementary ontologies. The proposal is a common building block, not a complete data model for every LCA.
