Semantics-based services for a low carbon society: An application on emissions trading system data and scenarios management
This work addresses the need for better information management tools for policy makers in low carbon societies, though it appears incremental as it applies existing semantic technologies to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the complexity of managing data and scenarios for the European Emissions Trading System (EU-ETS) by developing a knowledge base with an ontology and semantic rules, resulting in two innovative semantic services for improved decision support.
A low carbon society aims at fighting global warming by stimulating synergic efforts from governments, industry and scientific communities. Decision support systems should be adopted to provide policy makers with possible scenarios, options for prompt countermeasures in case of side effects on environment, economy and society due to low carbon society policies, and also options for information management. A necessary precondition to fulfill this agenda is to face the complexity of this multi-disciplinary domain and to reach a common understanding on it as a formal specification. Ontologies are widely accepted means to share knowledge. Together with semantic rules, they enable advanced semantic services to manage knowledge in a smarter way. Here we address the European Emissions Trading System (EU-ETS) and we present a knowledge base consisting of the EREON ontology and a catalogue of rules. Then we describe two innovative semantic services to manage ETS data and information on ETS scenarios.