An Open Source Dataset and Ontology for Product Footprinting.

Product footprint describes the environmental impacts of a product system. To identify such impact, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) takes into account the entire lifespan and production chain, from material extraction to final disposal or recycling. This requires gathering data from a variety of heterogeneous sources, but current access to those is limited and often expensive. The BONSAI project, instead, aims to build a shared resource where the community can contribute to data generation, validation, and management decisions. In particular, its first goal is to produce an open dataset and an open source toolchain capable of supporting LCA calculations. This will allow the science of lifecycle assessment to perform in a more transparent and more reproducible way, and will foster data integration and sharing. Linked Open Data and semantic technologies are a natural choice for achieving this goal. In this work, we present the first results of this effort (https://github.com/BONSAMURAIS/): (1) the core of a comprehensive ontology for industrial ecology and associated relevant data; and (2) the first steps towards an RDF dataset and associated tools to incorporate several large LCA data sources.