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Bo Weidema edited this page Apr 7, 2021 · 47 revisions

This Glossary should match the BONSAI ontology. In case of discrepancies, the official hosted ontology takes precedence.

Please insert new items in alphabetic order. Thank you.

Activity:

Making or doing something, including both human activities (production, consumption, and market activities, as well as accumulation of stocks) and environmental mechanisms (e.g. atmospheric energy balance, deposition, pollination), irrespective of their economic significance. Synonym used outside of BONSAI context: Process. This is one of the identifying dimensions of a datapoint (and the database).

API:

An Application Programming Interface is a set of subroutine definitions, protocols, and tools for building software for communication between separate software components.

Balanceable property:

A [Quantity] for which the sum for all input flows must equal the sum for all output flows e.g. dry mass, water mass, energy, elemental mass, person-time, monetary value (when measured in the same valuation). This is one of the identifying dimensions of a datapoint (and the database). Applies only to properties that adhere (approximately) to a conservation law.

Core data:

Set of all the datapoints in the core database.

Core database:

The core database can be described as a triplestore, containing data (numbers, units and uncertainty) on the flow of flow-objects between activities. Activities, flow-objects and flows can have properties.

Datapoint:

Quantification of an observation for a flow for a specific flow-property of a specific activity and flow-object; geographically and temporally specified. Has number, unit and uncertainty, and Reference unit.

Determining Flow:

A specific flow of an activity for which a change in demand or supply will affect the activity level (such as its production volume or extent). All other output flows are co-produced by or demanded for in that specific activity but do not determine its existence. A determining flow is the cause of the activity while all other flows are caused by it.

Digital object:

A bitstream described by metadata and referenced and identified by a persistent identifier.

Direct Requirements Table:

A matrix of flows of flow-objects between activities, with activities as columns and flow-objects as rows. Traditionally, the flow-objects are limited to products, but in BONSAI the flow-objects may also be environmental, i.e. without economic value. The matrix is normalised to the output vector of activities. The non- normalised matrix is what is generally known as an Input-Output Table, i.e., a linked version of the Supply Use Table, representing a linear, homogeneous steady-state model of the economy and the environment, where each human activity has only one product output, and all product inputs to a human activity is the product of another human activity, thus providing a linked product system for each product of each human activity. The transformation from Supply Use Table to Direct Requirements Table is described by a system model.

Exchange:

See "Flow"

Externalities (environmental):

Monetarised damages caused by a human activity and not included in the product price.

FAIR principle:

The FAIR principle is a set of foundational principles and guiding practices with the objective to allow all stakeholders to more easily discover, access, appropriately integrate and re-use, and adequately cite, the vast amounts of information being generated by contemporary data-intensive science. FAIR stands for:Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. For a more detailed description see Box 2

Fixed property:

A property that is stable across all identifying dimensions, and which therefore need only to be stored once for the activity or flow-object or it belongs to, separately from the individual datapoints.

Flow:

A measure of a causal, directional exchange of a flow-object that is consumed as input or produced as output of an activity or between two activities. The direction of the flow is indicated by the predicates "inputOf" or "outputOf" relating to the activity(ies). Outside of the BONSAI context, the direction of the flow is usually indicated by a sign convention, e.g. negative for inputs and positive for outputs.

Flow-object:

Entity that is able to be exchanged between two activities, produced or consumed by activities, or stored by a (stock accumulation) activity. This is one of the identifying dimensions of a datapoint (and the database).

Flow-property:

Property of a flow. This includes balanceable properties, properties for which the sum for all input flows must equal the sum for all output flows e.g. dry mass, water mass, energy, elemental mass, person-time, monetary value (when measured in the same valuation). Other flow-properties may translate between the balanceable properties, e.g. carbon content translating between dry mass and elemental mass of carbon, price per weight translating between mass and monetary property. Other flow-properties that are not balanceable may be fixed properties of e.g. the substance (chemical properties, etc.) while others may vary and therefore need to be recorded with the specific flow.

Impact:

Causal, directional relationship between an activity and an environmental issue of concern.

Leontief Inverse:

A matrix of scaling factors for activities and flow-objects, representing the production volume of each activity in a product system that is required in order for this product system to produce one unit of each of the flow-objects in this table. The Leontief inverse is calculated by matrix inversion of the Direct Requirements Table that represents the product system.

Location:

Geographical point, line or face.

Macro-economic scenario:

Socioeconomic metadescription/narrative that is used to produce internally consistent instances of datapoints for future time periods. In the ecoinvent terminology, it is a specification of the surrounding narrative that the modelling fits into (not a version issue). It is the identifier that allows to express e.g. that this data represents Amsterdam in 2 years with less growth, and then another scenario represents Amsterdam in 2 years with other conditions. Raw data are always in the past, but forecasting needs to be stored with the additional scenario name or tag that corresponds to it. The macro-economic scenario is one of the identifying dimensions of a datapoint (and the database).

Metadata:

Any attribute/description of a flow that is not necessary to define a datapoint (e.g. copyright holder, data source, ...), i.e. everything which is not the number, unit, uncertainty or necessary identifier of a datapoint. Complement to the core data.

Product:

Activity output with a positive either market or non-market value (utility). Sub-divided in goods (tangible products) and services (intangible products). Examples of products with a non-market value: Household childcare; internal by-products that later are transformed to products with a market value. Products of one activity can be intermediate inputs to another activity.

Product footprint:

Potential environmental impacts of a product system expressed in measures of one or more impact indicators. An impact indicator may be equivalent to a flow-object representing an environmental issue of concern. The footprint of a product can be calculated by multiplying the corresponding flows of that flow-object from each activity in a product system by the scaling factors for the product in the Leontief Inverse and summing over these multiplied numbers. Synonyms: Environmental profile; Eco-balance; Life cycle impact assessment result.

Product system:

System of consecutive and interlinked activities which models the production, use and final disposal of a product. Can be represented in a Direct Requirements Table, which represents as many product systems as it has products.

Production function:

The inputs and outputs of an activity, given per product output.

Property:

Attributes/characteristics of flow-objects, activities or flows. Note that this is different from an RDF property, which is the predicate of a data triple.

Raw data:

Data that cannot be traced further back as derived from other data. Non-raw data are defined by their explicit traceability: "From what other data was this data calculated?" If you cut the explicit connection, then such data becomes raw data again (which is of course not desirable).

Reference unit:

The measure to which the measure of a Flow should be seen as proportional to. For example, a flow of a specific measure of CO2 from an activity may be related to another flow of this activity (e.g. 1 km) or to a time period (it may for example be the annual flow from this activity).

Semantic:

The meaning or intent of a digital object

Supply Use Table (SUT):

A matrix of flows of flow-objects in and out of activities, with activities as columns and products as rows. Formally, this is called a make-use table. Traditionally, the flow-objects are limited to products, but in BONSAI the flow-objects may also be environmental, i.e. without economic value. The SUT represents data for individual activities before any linking or other data manipulation. It this represents the raw starting point for product system algorithms that link the individual activity data into product systems, as represented by the Direct Requirements Matrix. Make and use tables can be superimposed, thus avoiding string them separately, by applying a convention for inputs and outputs. When this is not otherwise implied (e.g. semantically by the predicate), BONSAI applies a sign convention, where inputs are recorded as negative and outputs as positive.

Stock:

The accumulated input minus the accumulated output of a stock accumulation activity.

System model:

A conceptual model describing a procedure for linking activities through their flows to form product systems, or more generally for transforming a Supply Use Table to a Direct Requirements Table. Synonyms used in input-output economics: Technology model/assumption/construct.

References to existing ontologies:

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