An Ontology-Based and Service-Oriented Information System Architecture to Enable Sustainable Management of Scarce Non-Renewable Resources

The scarcity of non-renewable resources today is a more and more crucial issue for many branches of industry. To counteract these problems, extensive, timely and up-to-date information on non-renewable resources' supply and demand is essential. Nevertheless, this information today is distributed, heterogeneous and only available in an informal or semi-formal structure. Thus, companies often do not have the right or up-to-date information to manage their usage of non-renewable resources adequately. This paper investigates if an ontology-based service-oriented information system architecture can cope with these difficulties and thus form the basis for the sustainable management of non-renewable resources. Based on an overview of the therefore needed types of information, an architecture that enables collection, structuring and processing information on nonrenewable resources is presented. A prototypical proof-of-concept implementation illustrates its benefits and its general applicability. Finally, the architecture is evaluated conceptually and by use of the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method.