Ontologies for Sustainability: Theoretical Challenges

The lack of sustainable practices in key sectors of human societies is a global concern, posing threats for the whole planet. This paper provides the first review of ontologies for sustainability efforts, outlining their roles in assessing and advancing such efforts. Section 2 outlines three major challenges associated with sustainability: (1) the polysemy of the term; (2) the relationship between sustainability and sustainable development; and (3) the complexity underlying sustainability. Section 3 reviews the main accomplishments achieved by ontologies to meet these theoretical challenges. Special attention is devoted to ontologies belonging to the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology (OBO)-Foundry community, due to the pivotal role these play in the field of applied ontology. A List of Sustainability Ontologies documents the assessed resources. Finally, Section 4 advances a potential trajectory to define an OBO Foundry-compliant family of sustainability ontologies and introduces a Sustainability Core Ontology (SCO) for consistently structuring this family.