Information Integration through Ontology and Metadata for Sustainability Analysis

Indicators of Sustainable Development (ISDs) make up a sophisticated set of information that can be employedas a means to study many aspects of a system’s sustainability. Methods for producing ISDs, as well as environmentalmodels in general, typically are strongly backed by data, so as to heighten their trustworthiness.This work proposes a sustainability analysis framework where higher level forms of data description, namely,a domain ontology and metadata, are employed to harness the data and to provide relevant elicited informationto a software tool which is ultimately responsible for yielding levels of sustainability of systems under analysis.Having the framework equipped with a metadata standard and a formal ontology of the domain whichare specified in standard and W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) recommended representational formalisms(XML and OWL) fosters information exchange and systems interoperability on the WWW platform.