Semantics-based services for a low carbon society: An application on emissions trading system data and scenarios management

TL;DR

This paper presents a semantic framework using ontologies and rules to support decision-making in low carbon policies, focusing on the EU Emissions Trading System and scenario management.

Contribution

It introduces a novel knowledge base with the EREON ontology and rules, enabling advanced semantic services for ETS data and scenario management.

Findings

Effective semantic services for ETS data management

Enhanced scenario analysis capabilities

Improved policy decision support tools

Abstract

A low carbon society aims at fighting global warming by stimulating synergic efforts from governments, industry and scientific communities. Decision support systems should be adopted to provide policy makers with possible scenarios, options for prompt countermeasures in case of side effects on environment, economy and society due to low carbon society policies, and also options for information management. A necessary precondition to fulfill this agenda is to face the complexity of this multi-disciplinary domain and to reach a common understanding on it as a formal specification. Ontologies are widely accepted means to share knowledge. Together with semantic rules, they enable advanced semantic services to manage knowledge in a smarter way. Here we address the European Emissions Trading System (EU-ETS) and we present a knowledge base consisting of the EREON ontology and a catalogue of rules. Then we describe two innovative semantic services to manage ETS data and information on ETS scenarios.