(714g) The Open Symbiotic Data Repository: A Data-Driven Perspective for Industrial Symbiosis

Web 2.0 has completely changed the way we create, disseminate and consume large volumes of information and new content. More and more corporate, governmental, or even user-generated datasets break the walls of “private” management within their production site, are published, and become available for potential data consumers. To this extent, the Web of Data is on the way to liberalize current Web to an interconnected, distributed, global data space connecting data from diverse domains. This gives added value for decision support and business intelligence applications, and enables new types of services that operate on top of an unbound, global data space and not on a fixed set of data sources as in Web 2.0 mashups.

The Web of Data is impelled by the current trend towards an Open Web. The Open Data movement is a significant and emerging force towards this direction. Open data are public , easily discoverable, accessible, and available to people without any restriction. Open data serve a great cause, enabling transparency, accountability and good governance for public administrations. As a side effect, open data promote sustainable growth, by exchanging usable knowledge and practices, and offer a new paradigm for business models and public/private partnerships.

The Symbiotic Open Data Repository is a joint effort to build a central reference point for data relating to the practice of Industrial Symbiosis (IS). At a first level, the project aims to aggregate and conceptualize a variety of existing information sets, such as material and waste categorizations, Life Cycle Inventories and functional models of chemical processing technologies. Taking it a step further, the project tries to encompass the great amount of tacit knowledge applied in numerous projects by IS practitioners, by providing the ability to share information in various file formats and semantically link it to existing concepts.