An ontology derived from heterogeneous sustainability indicator set documents

We present an ontology to represent the key concepts of sustainability indicators that are increasingly being used to measure the economic, environmental and social properties of complex systems. There have been few efforts to represent multiple indicators formally, in spite of the fact that comparison of indicators and measurements across reporting contexts is a critical task. In this paper, we apply the METHONTOLOGY approach to guide the construction of two design candidates we term Generic and Specific. Of the two, the generic design is more abstract, with fewer classes and properties. Documents describing two indicator systems - the Global Reporting Initiative and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development - are used in the design of both candidate ontologies. We then evaluate both ontology designs using the ROMEO approach, to calculate their level of coverage against the seen indicators, as well as against an unseen third indicator set (the United Nations Statistics Division). We also show that use of existing structured approaches like METHONTOLOGY and ROMEO can reduce ambiguity in ontology design and evaluation for domain-level ontologies. It is concluded that where an ontology needs to be designed for both seen and unseen indicator systems, a generic and reusable design is preferable.