Projecting Pathways to Food–Energy–Water Systems Sustainability Through Ontology

The FEWsOnt ontology models major structural and dynamic concepts of the food-energy-water (FEW) systems from the complex system perspective by defining the emergent, nonlinear, and scale-invariant state transitions and behaviors of the network elements that result from natural and planned processes. The model represents the semantics of concepts such as security, footprint, challenge, risk, impact, and uncertainty in relation to governance and assessment of the level of sustainability of the FEW systems in varied domains of usage. The ontology will allow stakeholders working with the FEW systems' data to draw new inferences using semantic facts and discover insights and relationships among the systems' elements to make improved assessment and decisions toward sustainable growth. The knowledge-based model will lead users to optimize the tradeoffs and identify and prevent adverse changes to the FEW systems in relation to the interacting natural and social systems. The annotated terminology and formalized interactions in the ontology will facilitate the integration of the diverse FEW data types, improve communication among researchers, and help to reduce environmental stresses.