PROCESO DE PRODUCCIÓN

Increased attention to the concepts of sustainability and sustainable development in different studies [Meadows et al., 2004; Burton, 1987] has encouraged the emergence of sustainability reporting. The term sustainability indicator, closely related to the concepts of sustainability and sustainability indicators discussed in Chapter 1, refers to a general set of descriptive reporting practices, from “top-down” annual reporting against standardised indicator sets, to ad hoc, one-off or semi-periodic assessments against “bottom-up” and locally-grown mea-sures [Fraser et al., 2006]. According to Magee et al. [2013] top-down approaches produce generalised sustainability reports by global focus, while bottom-up approaches tend to be adopted by non-government organisations (NGOs), sub-national or municipal authorities, and community groups [Agger, 2010]. The similarity of both approaches is found in the use of framework-based technique including a collection of measures, procedures, tools and principles that guides reporting practices.

There have been several attempts to develop domain and application ontologies in the context of sustainability and sustainability reporting indicator sets. Brilhante et al. [2006]

present an ontology for the domain of Indicators and Sustainable Development (ISDs)²¹with the emphasis on the economic dimension (ISD-Economics). This ontology is developed on

21http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/publications/indisdmg2001.pdf

Ontologies used in Sustainability and Sustainability Reporting Indicator Sets 36

the basis of the UN report on countries undertaking sustainable development programmes [Kuik and Gilbert, 2002]. ISD-Economics addresses several IDSs system concerns such as:

providing an appropriate vocabulary for the user interface with a hierarchical organisation of the domain, and operational performing on indicators using properties and relations defined in the ontology so on. Similarly, Madlberger et al. [2013] develop an ontology for the domain of Corporate Sustainability Information Systems. This ontology fulfils three requirements:

(i) Providing an intuitive representation of Corporate Sustainability concepts, (ii) Reflecting the hierarchical structure of economic indicators, and (iii) Generic mapping of sustainability heterogeneous resources – such as GRI-XBRL taxonomy – into the predefined concepts of the ontology.

Several application ontologies are also developed for specific tasks. Kumazawa et al.

[2009] outline an ontological approach to structure the concepts and relations within the field of sustainability science. Han and Stoffel [2011] suggest an ontology for the integration of qualitative case studies in the domain of environmental sustainability research. Similarly, an ontological approach is presented by Pinheiro et al. [2009] to link sustainability indica-tors. In addition, Pinheiro et al. [2009] present a social ontology by relating and structuring environmental, social and economic issues in a way that measures overall social sustainability.

A very recent study on urban indicators is presented by Fox [2014], which develops a generic and reusable ontology for the ISO37120 Global City Indicators with the use of existing foundation ontologies and generated trans-foundation axioms.

To a large extent, sustainability indicators are introduced to address issues of critical conditions in complex systems. In other words, indicators can help to provide solutions for such issues including three key objectives [Kuik and Gilbert, 2002]:

1. Raising awareness and understanding of a system.

2. Informing decision-making.

3. Measuring progress toward established goals.

In addition to the above objectives, sustainability indicators are particularly structured for the purpose of organisational governance, where they are offered developed as simple

Ontologies used in Sustainability and Sustainability Reporting Indicator Sets 37

taxonomies rather than fully fledged ontologies.

GRI    

Figure 2.4: A Snapshot of Sustainability GRI Indicator Set - Not all categories are shown

2.9.1 Taxonomies of Sustainability Reporting Indicator Sets

Well-known standardised frameworks for sustainability reporting and indicator sets include corporate reporting against the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) indicators and guide-lines²², the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)²³ and the United Nations Statistics Division (UN Social Indicators)²⁴. These organisations represent sustainability indicators in hierarchical structures including categories and sub-categories.

The snapshots of the GRI and OECD taxonomies are shown in Figures 2.4 and 2.5

compro-22http://www.globalreporting.org/

23http://www.oecd.org/

24http://www.un.org/esa

Ontologies used in Sustainability and Sustainability Reporting Indicator Sets 38

is  –  a  rela)on   OECD    

Environmental  &    

Resource  Produc7vity     Nature     Asset  base  

Produc7vity    Material     Produc7vity  

Figure 2.5: A Snapshot of OECD Sustainability Indicator Set - Not all categories are shown

mising categories and sub-categories (or aspects and themes) and indicators at the bottom of the hierarchy. More specifically, GRI sustainability indicator set is presented in eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL)²⁵. XBRL is an XML-based language introduced to exchange business information. It uses the XML notation such as XML schema, XLink²⁶ and XPath²⁷ to express the semantic connections required in business reporting. Only very limited research investigates how to transform such a taxonomy into an ontology. For exam-ple, Madlberger et al. [2013] first used GRI-XBRL taxonomy²⁸as the basis to automatically generate the concepts of the Corporate Sustainability ontology.

25http://www2.xbrl.org//au/

26http://www.w3.org/XML/Linking

27http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath/

28https://www.globalreporting.org/reporting/reporting-support/xbrl/Pages/default.aspx

Knowledge bases and Ontologies used in Social Media Content Analysis 39

Having discussed ontologies and sustainability, in response to the first two research ques-tions, we now turn to discuss the use knowledge bases and ontologies in social media in the context of disaster management, which is a background study to address the third research question.

2.10 Knowledge bases and Ontologies used in Social Media Content Analysis