An Integrated Knowledge Base for Sustainability Indicators

The objective of this research is to develop a knowledge base to represent and integrate data schemas for sustainability indicators. Over the past 30 years, sustainability and sustainable development not only in environmental, but also in economic and social areas has become a key theme in both academic and popular literature. The focus in this research is on how to represent the important features of sustainability indicators (defined and used by different organisations) that can be reused for different purposes, such as reasoning, reapplying and querying. Selection of sustainability indicators forms a key part of current organisational planning and reporting activities. In particular, the importance of measuring sustainability in urban environments has received considerable attention in the past couple of decades. One of the technical difficulties for stakeholders in cities is what sustainability indicators should be chosen in the urban context. We propose here that presenting multiple indicator sets in a commensurate way can be solved by use of an ontological approach. In order to address the task of choosing the most sui 2 ontology for urban indicator sets, first, we have reviewed and compared the indicators used by the cities of Vancouver and Melbourne. We have then looked to compare the combined list of indicators against the GRI (companyoriented) and OECD (country-oriented) indicator sets, to identify broadly their degree of conceptual overlap. Next, we have applied the ROMEO methodology to evaluate the degree of fit between both GRI and OECD indicators, and those used by existing cities in practice. One early outcome at this stage is that both GRI and OECD do not provide full coverage of candidate city categories. A subordinate result from this small sample also indicates that they miss some key social categories.