Represent Goal 12 (sustainable consumption and production patterns)

[pbuttigieg]

Represent Goal 12.

This will primarily involve ENVO and SDGIO, but many SDGIO classes will be pushed to new domain ontologies when they are created or found.

[pbuttigieg]

The top level classes "consumption" and "production" could be ENVO classes as they are more about systemic production and consumption rather than that of individuals. @rlwalls2008 PCO could also be relevant here as these refer to population- and community-level processes.

Several key words and phrases are present in more than one goal. These are not repeated below.

Target	Key[words, phrases]	Target ontologies	Notes
12.2	natural resources	ENVO, SDGIO	materials and possibly processes in ENVO with resource disposition in SDGIO
12.2	management, efficient use	SDGIO, PATO	possibly PATO for "efficient"
12.3	food	ENVO	food has been housed in ENVO for quite a while, pending adoption by a food-focused ontology.
12.3	per capita	PCO, SDGIO	PCO for representation of populations and SDGIO or similar to translate this into 'per capita'
12.3	retail level, consumer level, supply chain, production chain	economic and logistic ontologies required.	"supply chains" and related could be represented as anthropogenic environmental processes in ENVO, however.
12.3	harvest, waste, loss	ENVO	Possible anthropogenic classes in ENVO, as long as waste and loss refer to material entities (grain, meat products, etc) and not monetary equivalents. Would require a economic ontology for the latter.
12.4	waste (material)	ENVO	this would be a disposition of an environmental material
12.4	chemicals	CHEBI	relatively straightforward, depending on what constitutes a chemical in the corpus
12.4	life cycle	SDGIO	to be surrendered to an economic ontology?
12.4	international frameworks	SGIO	surrender to a policy ontology - what is an international framework?
12.4	agreed (and disputed)	SDGIO, PATO	This will be a fuzzy quality or status of a policy entity
12.4	release of chemicals and wastes	ENVO	an environmental process, wastes need to be defined.
12.4	soil, air, water	ENVO	already present, definitions must be checked for consistency with the SDGs
12.4	human health		SIO has a 'healthy' class, but a simple entity concerning 'health' is oddly missing from the ontologies indexed by Ontobee
12.4	environment	ENVO	environmental system, unless this is constrained to non-anthropogenic environments or some sort of list of environments of interest. In that case we'd have to represent this aggregate.
12.5	waste generation (prevention of, reduction of)	ENVO, SDGIO	Can be an environmental process.
12.5	recycling and reuse of waste (material)	ENVO, SDGIO	anthropogenic rather than natural recycling and reuse assumed. Will change disposition or role from waste to resource.
12.6	(large, small, medium, transnational) companies	SDGIO	instituted continuants with human and non-human parts, belongs to and should be surrendered to some sort of legal ontology, I'd think.
12.6	reporting cycle	SDGIO, OBI, IAO	very operational and can be very general (scientific/legal/agency/company reporting), some sort of planned process with an information artefact output.
12.6	sustainable practices	SDGIO	will have to find out what is meant by 'sustainable' in the context of the SDGs
12.6	sustainability information	SDGIO, IAO	about a sustainable practice, I assume.
12.7	promotion (of a process)	SDGIO, ENVO	As a very general, regulation-like process, this could be added to ENVO, but a class talking about the kind of promotion relevant to economic processes should probably be in SDGIO and surrendered to an economic ontology.
12.7	public	PATO, SDGIO	perhaps surrender to a legal ontology
12.7	procurement process	SDGIO	surrender to an economic or legal ontology
12.7	national policy	SDGIO	surrender to policy ontology
12.7	national priority	SDGIO	surrender to policy ontology
12.8	people everywhere	PCO	the total human population on Earth
12.8	information about sustainable development	IAO, SDGIO	the SD part will be defined in SDGIO
12.8	awareness	SDGIO	seems a psychological class, but could be in some sort of policy ontology (e.g. public awareness).
12.8	(human) lifestyle	SDGIO	could sit well in a behaviour ontology and be generalised to all species
12.8	harmony with nature	SDGIO	poetic, needs more precise definition probably connected with sustainability and interaction of human lifestyle with ecosystem processes (including a carefully constructed web of ecosystem services)
12.a	support (process of)	SDGIO, ENVO	as with promotion (12.7), this could be generalised and live in ENVO, but SDGIO should have the operationalised class.
12.a	developing countries	SDGIO	surrender to a policy/economics ontology
12.a	capacity (scientific, technological)	SDGIO	something like a disposition to generate scientific or technological products or render services. Surrender to economic or policy ontology. In this target, it's the capacity to "move towards" an SDG-compliant system state.
12.a	pattern (of sustainable consumption and production)	SDGIO, BFO	something as high-level as "pattern" may belong in BFO, if it can't be expressed using existing classes. SDGIO can have the subclass specific to this target.
12.b	monitoring process	SDGIO, OBI
12.b	monitoring tools	SDGIO, OBI
12.b	impact (of sustainable development)	SDGIO, ENVO
12.b	sustainable tourism	SDGIO, ENVO	surrender to an economic ontology, cross-link to environments and ecosystems
12.b	local	SGDIO
12.b	culture	SDGIO
12.b	politics	SDGIO
12.b	jobs	SDGIO	surrender to an economic ontology
12.c	rationalisation process	SDGIO	needs clarification
12.c	fossil fuel	ENVO	many classes already exist, however 'fuel' needs to be represented as a disposition.
12.c	subsidies	SDGIO	surrender to an economic and/or policy ontology
12.c	wasteful	PATO, SDGIO	hinges on good definition of waste
12.c	market	SDGIO	surrender to an economic ontology
12.c	market distortion	SDGIO	surrender to an economic ontology
12.c	taxation	SDGIO	surrender to an economic and or policy ontology
12.c	restructuring process	SDGIO	needs clarification
12.c	phasing out process	SDGIO	needs clarification
12.c	harmful (of subsidies)	SDGIO, PATO	needs clarification
12.c	environmental impacts	SDGIO, ENVO
12.c	needs and conditions (of developing countries)	SDGIO	needs clarification and more precision, surrender to an economic and or policy ontology?
12.c	(of countries) developmental impact	SDGIO
12.c	'the poor'	SDGIO, PCO, PATO
12.c	impacted communities	PCO, PATO, SDGIO

[pbuttigieg]

@mark-jensen first pass at goal 12 above - please evaluate in this issue. We can create a wiki page when we think we have arrived at a more stable table.

@cmungall @rlwalls2008 @phismith @pdez90 - may be of interest to you too, input is welcome.

[cmungall]

I think having consumption and production in ENVO makes more sense from a modularization point of view. Does this extend beyond human processes, e.g. to biogeochemical processes.

Waste: is this always from a human perspective? If a crop is destroyed by weevils, this is food waste from a human perspective, but weevils beg to differ. For recycling you're assuming anthropogenic, may be good to be explicit throughout.

"environment": remember a class expression like "impacts some 'environmental system'" is quite weak. Eating a portion of food impacts an environmental system. I think we will need some way of talking explicitly about the whole environment, or at least a major aggregate.

A lot of stuff you have under PATO might fit better in an ontology better suited to information artefacts or anthropogenic thingies.

I see parallels with processes in GO and we could reuse some design patterns:

• biosynthesis/catabolism: production/consumption (although there are subtleties in the difference between manufacture/synthesis and production. Does Apple US produce iPhones, or does China? We have analogous discussions about some molecules)
• secretion <=> release
• homeostasis <=> harmony (on dodgy territory here)

[phismith]

I am tempted to say that production and consumption are general enough to
belong to the interface ontology -- certainly they apply to legal, health,
food services -- consumption certainly applies e.g. to water

On Tue, Sep 22, 2015 at 3:05 PM, Chris Mungall [email protected]
wrote:

I think having consumption and production in ENVO makes more sense from a
modularization point of view. Does this extend beyond human processes, e.g.
to biogeochemical processes.

Waste: is this always from a human perspective? If a crop is destroyed by
weevils, this is food waste from a human perspective, but weevils beg to
differ. For recycling you're assuming anthropogenic, may be good to be
explicit throughout.

"environment": remember a class expression like "impacts some
'environmental system'" is quite weak. Eating a portion of food impacts an
environmental system. I think we will need some way of talking explicitly
about the whole environment, or at least a major aggregate.

A lot of stuff you have under PATO might fit better in an ontology better
suited to information artefacts or anthropogenic thingies.

I see parallels with processes in GO and we could reuse some design
patterns:

• biosynthesis/catabolism: production/consumption (although there are
  subtleties in the difference between manufacture/synthesis and production.
  Does Apple US produce iPhones, or does China? We have analogous discussions
  about some molecules)
• secretion <=> release
• homeostasis <=> harmony (on dodgy territory here)

—
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#16 (comment)
.

[ramonawalls]

In ecology, production and consumption can have somewhat restricted meanings, relating to carbon cycling. These processes could go into ENVO. However, I think we need more general terms for SDGIO, as Barry suggests.

[pbuttigieg]

@cmungall

I think having consumption and production in ENVO makes more sense from a modularization point of view. Does this extend beyond human processes, e.g. to biogeochemical processes.

I think this goal is anthropocentric, but ENVO can classes concerned with the production and consumption of material entities. In terms of services, I'm not so sure (see phismith's comment below).

Waste: is this always from a human perspective? If a crop is destroyed by weevils, this is food waste from a human perspective, but weevils beg to differ. For recycling you're assuming anthropogenic, may be good to be explicit throughout.

We're picking this up in #35. The crop destruction isn't really waste, more like loss, but I get your point. There is definitely a dimension of intent that has to be represented.
On recycling: yes, we'll be more specific in the label.

"environment": remember a class expression like "impacts some 'environmental system'" is quite weak. Eating a portion of food impacts an environmental system. I think we will need some way of talking explicitly about the whole environment, or at least a major aggregate.

Agreed: sounds like a thresholding issue. Who decides when an environment has been significantly impacted? I suppose it's connected to whether or not the environmental system can still realise its functions, carry out its processes, and act as a habitat for its ecological populations after the 'impact'. Even if it can in an absolute sense, how much does the magnitude have to change for this to be considered an impact? Let's follow up in #47.

A lot of stuff you have under PATO might fit better in an ontology better suited to information artefacts or anthropogenic thingies.

I generally added a PATO tag if there was a quality involved. Of course, qualities can live elsewhere without impacting the semantics if we import BFO:dependent continuant and its subclasses. Should we just add these to SDGIO for convenience and, if there's reason to, ship them to PATO later?

I see parallels with processes in GO and we could reuse some design patterns:
biosynthesis/catabolism: production/consumption (although there are subtleties in the difference between manufacture/synthesis and production. Does Apple US produce iPhones, or does China? We have analogous discussions about some molecules)
secretion <=> release
homeostasis <=> harmony (on dodgy territory here)

Good points, and very pertinent to notions from ecological economics that will certainly feature in this realm of semantics. I don't think things are too far removed, Apple (like the TCA cycle) is some configuration of participants (like anatabolic and catabolic enzymes, regulatory elements, etc) some of which are humans with factory worker roles in China which contribute to the production of some material entity.
Secretion would be a special case of 'release'. Homeostasis can be far from desirable, in some cases; I'd associate it more with processes that buffer perturbations and return systems to some defined state (cf. resilience).

@phismith

I am tempted to say that production and consumption are general enough to belong to the interface ontology -- certainly they apply to legal, health, food services -- consumption certainly applies e.g. to water

The kinds of production and consumption that occur in ENVO would be limited to the production and consumption of environmental materials or features. SDGIO would need to account for the consumption of information, services, and similar entities. It would be a stretch to include those in ENVO as it currently stands.

For example, while ENVO would contain environmental processes, the fact that these are ecosystem services would probably be expressed in SDGIO or an ontology derived therefrom. ENVO could have processes like "crop irrigation" which would be a form of water consumption (has input some [portion of] water). SDGIO could have a class with a logical definition: process and has input some ENVO:water.

@rlwalls2008

In ecology, production and consumption can have somewhat restricted meanings, relating to carbon cycling. These processes could go into ENVO. However, I think we need more general terms for SDGIO, as Barry suggests.

Do keep in mind that ENVO is not restricted to ecology, despite ecology being an important concern. If the production and consumption is somehow pertinent to the interactions in a environmental system, ENVO could host the classes. I'm not averse to having these in other ontologies and importing if needed; however, describing anthropogenic ecosystems does require some forms of production and consumption that are not from ecologically terminology.

[ramonawalls]

Based on those arguments, I am happy to see production and consumption as general terms in ENVO.