Ontologies for Sustainability: Theoretical Challenges
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The lack of sustainable practices in key sectors of human societies is a global concern, held by some to threaten the life of the whole planet. To date, we have found that no studies review ontologies in terms of sustainability. This paper aims to fill such a gap. In Section 1, we outline the 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. In Section 2, we review the main accomplishments achieved so far by ontologies to meet these theoretical challenges. We devote special attention to ontologies belonging to the OBO Foundry due to the pivotal role these play in the field of applied ontology. We provide a List of Sustainability Ontologies documenting the resources we assessed. To conclude, we advance a potential trajectory to further develop an OBO Foundry-compliant family of sustainability ontologies.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.021 | 0.033 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.047 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".