Common Ontology of Sustainable Development

Introduction

Sustainable development (SD) in its various aspects is a multifaceted, complex and contradictory concept, interpreted in numerous studies. According to the most known and commonly accepted definition, “SD is a development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (Brundtland Commission 1987, p. 43). There are over 100 definitions of the SD and most of them are based on the understanding that the SD relates to nature, economy and society, including risk management. The SD studies are inseparable from their modeling and the need to involve researchers from a wide range of natural, engineering, mathematical, social, and economic sciences. Depending on the methods of research used, the modeling of SD, as the modeling of many other systems and processes, can be ontological, mathematical, informational, economic, etc. Increasingly, the ontological modeling attends the research in any knowledge area and is a conceptual basis for concrete development. An ontology is a tool of formal knowledge representation and knowledge generation. In the recent past, ontologies were purely theoretical, but now they are becoming more widely practical products – both for human-computer communications and for automatic knowledge retrieval and reuse.

The need of common ontology in SD area arises with respect to the requirement for systematization and ambiguous interpretation of its inherent terminology. Hereof, in the current work an ontological metamodel of SD is proposed and a common ontology of SD (COSD) as a top level of the metamodel is developed.

The next section is a review of the state-of-the-art concerning the main SD concepts and the known related ontologies. The SD knowledge area and links to other scientific and practical areas are explored. A preliminary review and an analysis of existing ontologies in the SD area is carried out. The ontological metamodel and a methodology for creating COSD in the third section are represented. In that, a coevolutionary approach and standard methods and resources of Semantic Web are applied. The fourth section includes description of the COSD formalization, verification, querying and publishing. In the conclusion, a summary of the outcomes and the future investigations are discussed.