Rationale and objectives

The Anthropogenic Impact Accounting Ontology (AIAO) enables the description of human impact on any environment. Impact accounting will play an important role in managing our relationship with the environment through the 21st century. A multitude of methods and standards exist for describing and quantifying environmental impact. Using standard semantic web technology, AIAO is a fundamental ontology that can used as a tool for aggregating, comparing and consolidating impact accounting data across different standards and vocabularies. The ontology intends to be generic enough for anthropogenic impact accounting in almost any discipline and context, including climate action impact accounting.

Status

AIAO has been in development since April 2021. The ontology is functionally complete and currently published at https://purl.org/aiaontology and https://github.com/aartum/CA2-SIG-StandardsWG/.

Further development and documentation is ongoing. The priority for the second half of 2024 is to improve documentation and to develop case studies with example data models and systems that use the ontology.

In this round, our project would also like to promote the use of AIAO among the Actors registered in the Climate Innovation Ecosystems of Latin America and Caribbean Survey created by Christian Daube at EIT Climate-KIC.

Relevance to GG21

AIAO forms part of the core infrastructure for web3 climate solutions and is especially relevant for carbon accounting, as it provides the ontology that can give rise to mutually interpretable data models and systems. The core concepts include the ontology or a view of what exists, an epistemology or a view of how we know things, and a semiology or a view of how to represent things.

As the Standards Working Group (Standards WG) of the Climate Action and Accounting Special Interest Group (CA2-SIG) at the Hyperledger Foundation, we developed AIAO by breaking the concept of climate action and the process of climate accounting down to their most essential structures, and considering how those can be represented in software to enable consistent climate accounting across protocols, methodologies and standards.