Aligning the FEDeRATED Upper Ontology with Battery and Electronics Ontologies to Aid Circular Economy Monitoring in Practice

Abstract

Facilitating Circular Economy (CE)’s monitoring requires access to data from different systems and data spaces. Motivated by this, a number of organizations have established data sharing agreements in line with the European Interoperability Framework to facilitate technical, semantic, organisational, and legal interoperability. Each data space, however, may follow its own domain-specific semantics. While this supports data’s interoperability within the data space, it also poses a challenge in cases such as CE’s monitoring, which requires data from several data spaces to be accessed, combined and analyzed. Supporting findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) data sharing not only within but also between data spaces is key. Ontology alignment can help facilitate semantic interoperability across data spaces and support CE’s monitoring. Following this, we present an upper-ontology-based alignment approach to aid CE’s monitoring in practice. We showcase the implementation of the approach for aligning the FEDeRATED upper-level ontology for data sharing with the RePlanIT (electronics), BattINFO (batteries) ontologies and the Catena-X (cars) data model. As a result, the alignments can be used by parties interested in data sharing between the battery, electronics and car data spaces to generate data sharing agreements, define data access controls and ultimately monitor CE’s implementation. We also share lessons learned from the implementation of the approach and provide a discussion on future directions for semantic-enabled CE monitoring.