SustainOnt: an ontology for defining an index of neighborhood sustainability across domains

Abstract

Massive amounts of data, both structured and unstructured, are available to be harvested for competitive business advantage, sound government policies, and new insights in a broad array of applications. This paper specifically focuses on extraction, integration, and querying of open data available about environmental sustainability. The global trend toward urbanization has created a need for residents of urban neighborhoods to better understand the factors impacting the social, environmental, and economic sustainability of an area. To date, there is no concise representation of all aspects of sustainability. This paper aims to fill this gap. A version of sustainability resting on economic, societal, and environmental development as the three main indicators was chosen to inform an ontology called SustainOnt used to organize and analyze relevant data from various sources. The newly-linked data is made available through a dual-platform application aimed at reaching a wide array of audiences. An initial prototype has been designed, using data for a small region, to provide a sustainability index of each city and/or neighborhood area that can be more accessible to people without the means to directly analyze the available data.